In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, two friends, Vladimir and Estragon, endlessly wait by a tree in the moonlight for the arrival of someone they both claim to know but neither would recognize – someone named Godot. While they wait, they talk about the Gospels, suicide, the past and the future. They exchange shoes and hats. They contemplate leaving. Most of all, they try to make sense of the situation. But doing so – trying to understand and control their circumstances – leads to anxiety. It is the attempt to make sense of the absurd that spells their demise.

Like most postmodern literature it’s unclear what, exactly, Waiting for Godot is about. But that’s the point. You create meaning for yourself. The potential concern is that, while inherent meaning might exist in the world, human beings will always struggle to find it. This was Vladimir and Estragon’s problem, and Beckett cleverly subjects the audience to a similar fate. With so much to interpret, we inevitably interpret incorrectly, and nihilism sets in.

Meaning, and the struggle to find it, is not just subject matter for the playwright or author. It affects most of us, especially those in the West living in the so-called secular age. According to the philosopher Roman Krznaric, “never have so many people felt so unfulfilled in their career roles, and been so unsure what to do about it. Most surveys in the West reveal that at least half the workforce are unhappy in their jobs.” In other words, we’re spending our lives searching for meaning – waiting for our Godot – and failing.

The problem, paradoxically, is just that: we’re searching. Consider a paper by the psychologist Iris Mauss and three colleagues. They discovered over the course of two experiments that participants who sought happiness were less happy than participants in a control group. The idea is the more we value something, the more likely we will be disappointed, even when we obtain what we’re searching for. By analogy, imagine an academically minded student who considers anything lower than perfection a disappointment. Despite above average marks, he will believe himself a failure. The lesson here is not to lower expectations but to not emphasize only one variable. When we fail to do that we get caught in a Zeno’s paradox of sorts – no matter how hard we try, we’ll never arrive at our destination.

The Declaration of Independence popularized the term “the pursuit of Happiness”, although the original unalienable rights were “Life, Liberty and Property.” The reason Jefferson and his reviewers switched “Property” to the axiomatic “pursuit of Happiness” is somewhat enigmatic, but we know Jefferson admired the Roman poet Lucretius, which provides a hint.

Lucretius is the author of On The Nature of Things, a poem that draws on Epicureanism to advocate, among other things, that life should be about the enhancement of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Jefferson owned at least five copies of On The Nature of Things, and when asked about his life’s philosophy, he wrote, “I am an Epicurean.” Critically, Lucretius (and Epicurus before him) was not suggesting we live a life of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll; he knew that type of pleasure was fleeting. Instead, the Roman wordsmith was concerned with something deeper: the pleasure one receives from friendship, community and living modestly. Moderation was a virtue for him.

We’ve largely misinterpreted Jefferson’s axiom in this regard. Conceived as a quest for pleasure, we mistakenly placed happiness outside of the body, spawning the delusion that we must search for it – as if it was a certain distance away. So we spend money, apply for jobs, get degrees, do drugs and go on dates in the name of happiness, even though, as we’ve seen, doing so is a path to unhappiness. When happiness is external, it is elusive; we end up waiting around believing, rather foolishly, that it will arrive.

And when it doesn’t we start asking questions like: “What is the meaning of life?” Despite its ostensible attachment to ancient Greek philosophers, this question is a modern one. This is because for most of Western history, religion was the answer; it allowed followers to exist without questioning their existence. It was only when Enlightenment thinkers replaced God with reason, Nietzsche killed God, and the industrial revolution took hold, that we started searching for meaning (only when we felt alienated).

Now we are faced with the existential burden of having to define our existence on our own terms. Yet, if Western culture in the twentieth century is read as a series of responses to the death of God, then I can’t think of any good ones so far. In fact, we’ve probably spent more time observing and critiquing our nihilism than fixing it. Think about Gatsby’s quixotic quest for success, David Foster Wallace’s interest in the “banal platitudes” of adult life, and the Sisyphean lives of Jim Halpert (The Office), Peter Gibbons (Office Space) and Lester Burnham (American Beauty). Is there any way to live a life of pleasure like Epicurus and Lucretius imagined? Can we find meaning in a secular age?

In the book All Things Shining, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly suggest that sports is one answer, it “may be the place in contemporary life where Americans find sacred community most easily.” NYU professor Jonathan Haidt makes similar arguments, citing raves and political rallies as well as sports as mediums where humans feel part of a collective. Beyond these secular examples, I struggle to think of more, even though I’m sure many exist.

The problem, I should clarify, is not necessarily that we’re lacking meaning. The literature on cognitive biases suggests we are facing the opposite problem: we’re drowning in meaning. We see patterns that don’t exist, faces in the clouds, believe in essences, and stereotype. We cannot not find meaning. The problem is we struggle to find meaningful meaning. We need something – a team, a band, or a politician – to filter our beliefs and provide some coherence to our worldview, even if it that worldview is an illusionary one. Otherwise we’re lost.

Some sixty years after Waiting for Godot we know that the search for happiness and meaning is self-defeating: if you’re looking for either, you’ve already failed. Yet, I can’t help but think that we’ll react to this reality by simply waiting longer.

Recall this pivotal scene from the 1997 movie, Men in Black. James Edwards (Will Smith, or Agent J) arrives at the headquarters of MiB – a secret agency that protects Earth from extraterrestrial threats – to compete with “the best of the best” for a position. Edwards, a confident and cocky NYPD officer, completes various tests including a simulation where he shoots an ostensibly innocent schoolgirl. When asked why, Edwards explains that compared to the freakish aliens, the girl posed the biggest threat. He passes the test: potentially dangerous aliens are always disguised as real humans. Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) offers him a position at MiB and the remaining candidates’ memories are erased. They return to normal life without ever realizing that the aliens were a ruse – a device for Agent K to detect how sagacious the candidates really were.

This wily test of intelligence and mindfulness is defined by two characteristics. The first is that most people fail it; the second is a subtle trick intentionally implemented to catch careless thinking (the schoolgirl for example). Narratives in literature and film that incorporate this test go something like this: scores have tried and failed because they overlooked the trick – even though they confidently believed they did not – until one day a hero catches it and passes the test (Edwards). Game of Thrones readers may recall the moment Syrio became the first sword of Braavos. Unlike others before him, when the Sealord asked Syrio about an ordinary cat, Syrio answered truthfully instead of sucking up. (The ending of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade also comes to mind, but this does not fit the narrative for a critical reason. Those who failed did not live under the mistaken belief that they succeeded – they were beheaded.)

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Adam Alter is an NYU Assistant Professor of Marketing and the author of Today Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel and Behave. I came across Adam’s book a few months ago, and after reading the summary I knew I needed to pick up a copy. I contacted Adam and he was nice enough to send me the book, which I enjoyed. Anyone interested in human behavior should consider buying this book. It’s filled with psychological insights that will make you think twice about what makes us tick. Adam was nice enough to answer some questions. So, without further ado…

McNerney: Lance Armstrong is brawny, Francine Prose writes well and people whose names begin with the letter K gave more to Hurricane Katrina relief. Adam, what’s going on here???

Alter: There are two distinct effects here. The first—the tendency for people to trace destinies that mirror their names—is known as nominative determinism (literally, “determined by name”). There’s a great Wikipedia page devoted to aptronyms—names that match life outcomes—from German psychiatrist and anxiety expert Jules Angst, to lawyer Sue Yoo.

Despite these vivid anecdotes, nominative determinism has a rocky past. There’s some mixed evidence that people’s lifestyles resemble the meaning expressed in their names, but there’s other evidence that suggests the effect is weak or non-existent. Assuming some people are prodded to live lives that mimic their names, one possibility is that they develop a fondness for life paths that remind them of themselves. We’re an egotistical species, and since most of us like our names and what they represent (us!), we’re drawn to outcomes that match those names.

There’s stronger evidence for other name effects, though. For example, people with typically white-sounding names are far more likely than people with typically black-sounding names to receive a response when they apply for a job. Lawyers with simpler names rise up the legal hierarchy faster than lawyers with more complex names, even when they graduate from equally strong law schools, have spent the same period of time practicing as a lawyer, and have American-sounding names.

The second effect you identified is the tendency for people to donate more to hurricanes that share their first initial. Again, there are a couple of possibilities. We know that people like their initials more than they like other letters (a phenomenon known as the name-letter effect), so it’s possible that they respond just a bit more sentimentally, and donate a bit more generously, when the hurricane shares their name. The other possibility is that a hurricane that shares their initial tugs at their attention a bit more insistently, so they’re more engaged when the storm wreaks havoc and they’re asked to donate.

McNerney: Teachers told me not judge to a book by its cover. But some of the studies in your book suggest that this might be impossible, at least unconsciously. One example stands out. In a study from the 1980s John Darley and Paget Gross showed a video of a girl named Hannah to two different groups. One saw her in an affluent neighborhood and the other saw her in a poor neighborhood. The psychologists found that the participants who watched Hannah in an affluent neighborhood described her as having above average academic ability while the group participants who watched her in a poor neighborhood said the opposite. Explain the negative long-term consequences of unconscious stereotyping.

Alter: The classic Hannah study you described does a fantastic job of illustrating the insidiousness of unconscious stereotyping. In the book I argue that subtle cues have magnified effects on our lives, and this is a perfect example. In that study, students perceived Hannah’s performance on a test differently depending on whether she seemed rich or poor. Now imagine that these two Hannahs are assigned to different classes at school based on their “performance” on the test—the rich Hannah learns among high-achieving peers, goes on to achieve higher SAT scores, and lands a good position at university. The poor Hannah fares less well on her SATs (partly because she was consigned to the lower-achieving class years earlier), and consequently struggles to get into college. One small wrinkle in their outcomes early in life—a wrinkle created by unconscious stereotyping—had profound effects years later.

McNerney: Drunk Tank Pink has an interesting chapter on the power of symbols: Apple’s logo boosts creativity, American flags make us more patriotic and we’re quick to deem people immoral after viewing images resembling a swastika. My favorite example is a study you conducted with Daniel Oppenheimer that demonstrated the influence a fake US dollar bills has on our valuations. Could you briefly explain this study and what it suggests about how the mind works?

Alter: In that study, we asked people to estimate how much they could purchase with a dollar bill. We gave each of them a questionnaire that depicted a dollar bill with space to guess how much of each of ten cheap items that dollar bill could buy—M&Ms, paperclips, paper napkins, thumbtacks, and so on.

For half of the participants, the dollar bill at the top of the page was a faithful photocopy of a real dollar bill. For the remaining participants, we photoshopped the bill so it differed subtly from the real bill. If you look at a real dollar bill, for example, George Washington faces right, but in our fake bill we rotated his image so he faced left. The differences were so subtle that not one of the participants recognized that the bill had been altered—but they still believed it could buy about 60% less of each of the ten items. Somehow, the bill’s novelty diminished its purchasing power.

In other studies in the paper we showed that unfamiliar forms of real currency—the Jefferson $2 bill or the Sacagawea $1 coin, for example—seemed less valuable than the standard $1 bill as well (except when people had encountered those rarer forms of currency many times before). Familiarity imbues currency with value, which suggests that the U.S. treasury and mint should think carefully before they blithely introduce 50 State quarters and a series of updated bills!

McNerney: Sartre’s maxim that Hell is other people appears a bit simplistic after reading the social psychological research you present in chapter four “The Mere Presence of Other People.” Sprinters run faster during competition, but one study found that students who took the SAT in rooms with fewer people scored better on average. We mimic people we like and after learning about the French adventurer Michel Siffre it sounds like extended social isolation is worse than death. Here’s my question: what finding or phenomenon that you came across in your research changed your mind the most about the social life of human beings?

Alter: That’s a great question. For me, the isolation findings are some of the most striking in all of social psychology. They illustrate just how acutely we need social contact to survive. Take the case of Michel Siffre, whom you mentioned. Siffre was fit, healthy, and young. People were fascinated by the space race in the 1950s and 1960s, and Siffre decided to contribute to the cause by simulating the sort of isolation that astronauts might experience in space. More than once, he confined himself to the depths of a cave, miles from human contact. Despite choosing to spend time away from other people, Siffre quickly broke down each time. He cried, grew depressed, mistook his hallucinations for reality, and once befriended a mouse. He had plenty of food, water, and entertainment, but without the presence of another human, Siffre was defeated.

Some people do better without social contact than others, but many wither very quickly. That’s very surprising to me, even now. When you live in Manhattan—one of the most densely-populated cities on Earth—you hear people romanticizing about “getting away from it all,” but their intuitions about how long they might last away from civilization are badly flawed. Just as we can’t imagine eating again after a big meal (though a few hours later we’re famished), so we can’t imagine that we’d ever want to see another human again after human contact. That mistaken intuition fascinates me.

McNerney: An unfortunate feature of the social brain is an ingrained xenophobia. We see the world not objectively but through the lens of the culture we are born into. In a couple of chapters on how we perceive other people and how culture affects that perception you paint a somewhat pessimistic picture of human social life. Modernity reminds us that we’re able to overcome natural prejudices. Based on your research what pro-social capacities allow us to accomplish this in order to cooperate and collaborate better?

Alter: I agree that some of the research told a bleak story, but much of it was quite optimistic. In some of my own research, with social psychologist Virginia Kwan, people behaved differently when embedded in different cultural environments even very briefly. After shopping at a Chinese supermarket or walking through Chinatown in Manhattan, European Americans took on some of the cognitive patterns more typical of Chinese than American culture. For example, Chinese philosophers emphasize the inevitability of cyclical change—day becomes night; the seasons shift from warm to cold and back again—whereas Western philosophers were more focused on the concept of continuous progress towards an endpoint. Those ancient beliefs now express themselves in American and Chinese cultures. Normally Americans expect financial stocks that have been appreciating to continue to appreciate, whereas East Asians are more likely to believe that, like the inevitable setting of the sun, an appreciating stock must surely depreciate soon. When we asked Americans who had recently shopped at a Chinese supermarket, walked through Chinatown, or seen a Taoist Yin-Yang symbol (which symbolizes cyclical change and balance), their stock predictions mimicked those of East Asians. This result suggests that the gulfs that separate cultures may be easier to bridge than we believe.

Still, I agree that the picture is bleak: xenophobia is pervasive, and it’s difficult to imagine a truly post-racial (or post-religious) era. But while it’s impossible to stop people from prejudging and relying on stereotypes, we do our best to manage the situation by erecting societal shields, from anti-discrimination laws to affirmative action policies. I’m not suggesting that humans are incapable of good—we’re also responsible for incredible kindnesses—but it seems foolish to rely on inherent goodness to trump our instincts for divisiveness.

McNerney: I think my favorite part of the book is the chapter on colors. But I have a beef to pick with the color red. You mention a physician, Felix Deutsch, who curbed heart palpitations and shortness of breath in a patient by placing her in a red room. This suggests red has a therapeutic effect. However, in another study two wily anthropologists discovered that wrestlers wearing red uniforms win, on average, slightly more than wrestlers in blue uniforms, suggesting that red is connected to aggression. Finally, you mention that red is biologically associated with dominance and aggression (a possible evolutionary explanations for the wrestlers) but it is also associated with blushing. What’s up with red? And what does it teach us about how colors influence the mind?

Alter: That’s an excellent question. As with so many psychological effects, the key is context. When you ask people to tell you what they think about when they see the color red, many of them say “blood.” But our skin reddens at the rush of blood for many different reasons. In the context of dating it might signal sexual excitement, but in the context of a boxing match it might signal aggression and the will to fight.

You also mentioned Felix Deutsch, who was a pioneer in the field of color research. Some of his methods were less than rigorous, though, and though he found that red light pacified one patient, other researchers have shown that red light excites and agitates people. Deutsch wrote some terrific papers on color psychology, but often he relied on anecdotes rather than tightly controlled lab studies. When those studies came later, they overturned some of Deutsch’s shakier findings.

McNerney: Finally, as a Manhattanite with a bedroom on the street, the studies you mentioned demonstrating the ill effects of noise pollution confirmed my intuition that falling asleep to loud trucks and police sirens is not exactly healthy for my brain. Give us a few of your favorites examples to explain how the environment affects well-being for better or for worse.

Alter: One of my favorite examples in the book follows a series of hospital patients who were recovering from gall bladder surgery. By accident rather than design, the hospital was designed so half the patients’ rooms looked out onto a brick wall, whereas the others looked out onto a small stand of leafy trees. After surgery, the patients were randomly assigned to recover in one of the two room types. The difference in recovery time and wellbeing was immense. Patients with a view of the trees returned home a day sooner, experienced fewer depressive episodes, and needed half as many painkillers. All this from a view of trees!

That’s bad news for people whose apartments look out onto a brick wall (as a Manhattanite you’re lucky to have a street view!), but the message is optimistic. The Germans and Japanese have it right, because they prescribe forest walks as a form of psychological therapy—and even a pot plant or the simulation of a running stream and trees is enough to improve your wellbeing.

On the other end of the spectrum, researchers have shown that children who live on lower floors in tall residential buildings near a highway learn to speak and read more slowly than do children who live on higher floors. The noise of the traffic is sometimes so intense that it leaves the children with mild hearing deficits. Later, they struggle to distinguish between similar-sounding words like “bout” and “pout,” which slows their reading progress. What’s surprising is not that nature is good and loud noise is bad, but rather that nature and noise pollution have such profound effects on all sorts of measures of wellbeing.

Thanks Adam!

Drunk Tank Pink

Originally posted in four parts on BigThink.com

Consider the story of my first encounter with Sartre.

I read Being and Nothingness in college. The professor, a Nietzsche aficionado, explained Sartre’s adage that existence precedes essence. After two years of ancient philosophy the idea struck me as profound. If it was true, then Plato and Aristotle were wrong: there are no Forms, essences or final causes. Meaning isn’t a fundamental abstract quality; it emerges from experience.

But that’s not what has remained with me. We might simply say that the flamboyant French existentialist believed that we ought to live in “good faith” in order to live authentically. To the psychologist the authentic life is a life without cognitive dissonance; the realist might say it means you don’t bullshit yourself. For Leon Festinger it’s a world in which his doomsayers admit that the destruction of Earth is not, in fact, imminent. For Aesop it’s a world in which the fox admits the grapes are ripe.

Sartre’s philosophy of authenticity remains with me because of a relationship I had with a classmate. I have in mind an ironically inclined peer whom I recall getting high after class and talking about living authentically. Mind you, this occurred while he wore clothes that referenced an earlier generation and drank beer targeting a much different demographic than his own. He was doubling down on irony.

You can imagine my horror when I realized that I was not unlike him. I was a college student, after all: I was selective with my clothes and I too engaged in pseudo-intellectual conversations with my friends. Worse, I used Being and Nothingness to confirm my authenticity and his phoniness. If the role of the conscious mind is to reconcile the pressures of the external world with the true self then I was hopelessly inauthentic. I was a poseur living an unexamined life. The joke was on me.

It was only until recently that the lesson of my time with Sartre and the hipster truly registered. There are times, I realized, when people (myself included) behave or decide counter to recently acquired knowledge. It’s worse than simply misinterpreting or not learning; it’s doing the opposite of what you’ve learned – you’re actually worse off. I’m tempted to term this the “Hipster Mistake” after my existential experience in which reading Sartre caused me to live less authentically. But let’s call this counter-intuitive phenomenon the Sartre Fallacy after my friend Monsieur Sartre.

After the Sartre Fallacy fully registered, a perfect example from cognitive psychology emerged in my mind. Change blindness occurs when we don’t notice a change in our visual field. Sometimes this effect is dramatic. In one experiment researchers created a brief movie about a conversation between two friends, Sabina and Andrea, who spoke about throwing a surprise party for a mutual friend. The two women discuss the party as the camera cuts back and forth between the two, sometimes focusing only on one and other times both. After the participants watched the minute-long movie the researchers asked, “Did you notice any unusual difference from one shot to the next where objects, body positions, or clothing suddenly changed?”

The researchers – Dan Simons and Daniel Levin – are wily psychologists. There were, in fact, nine differences throughout the movie purposely put in to test change blindness. They were not subtle either. In one scene Sabina is wearing a scarf around her neck and in the next scene she isn’t; the color of the plates in front of Sabina and Andrea change from one scene to the next. Nearly every participant said nothing of the alterations.

In a follow up experiment Levin explained the premise of the Sabina-Andrea study (including the results) to undergraduates. 70 percent reported that they would have noticed changes even though no one from the original study did. Let this detonate in your brain: the undergrads concluded that they would notice the changes knowing that the participants in the original study did not. The lesson here is not that change blindness exists. It is that we do not reconsider how much of the world we miss after we learn about how much of the world we miss – the follow up experiment actually caused participants to be more confident about their visual cortices. They suffered from change blindness blindness,so to speak (the visual equivalent to the Sartre Fallacy), even though the sensible conclusion would be to downgrade confidence. Here we see the Sartre Fallacy in action (and if you doubt the results of the second experiment you’re in real trouble).

I committed a similar error as an undergraduate about one year after falling pray to the Sartre Fallacy. My interest in philosophy peaked around the time I finished Being and Nothingness. The class continued with de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex but it was not, I quickly noticed, that sexy; The Fall and Nietzsche’s bellicosity were much more seductive. In fact, with a few exceptions (Popper and later Wittgenstein) philosophy becomes incredibly boring after Nietzsche. The reason, simply, is the old prevails over the new and not enough time has passed to determine who is worth reading. It’s a safe bet that the most popular 20^th century philosopher in the 23^rd century is currently unpopular.* This is one reason why death is usually the best career move for philosophers. Good ideas strengthen with time.

With this in mind I turned to psychology where experiments like the ones the Dans conducted reignited my neurons. I especially enjoyed the literature on decision-making, now a well-known domain thanks to at least three more psychologists named Dan: Kahneman, Ariely, and Gilbert. I read Peter Wason’s original studies from the 1960s and subsequent experimentation including Tom Gilovich’s papers on the hot hand and clustering illusions. Confirmation bias, the first lesson in this domain, stood out: the mind drifts towards anything that confirms its intuitions and preconceptions while ignoring anything that looks, sounds or even smells like opposing evidence. An endless stream of proverbs since language emerged underlines this systematic and predictable bias but the best contemporary description comes from Gilbert: “The brain and the eye may have a contractual relationship in which the brain has agreed to believe what they eye sees, but in return the eye has agreed to look for what the brain wants.” I still remember reading this gem and immediately uncapping my pen.

But then something unexpected occurred. Suddenly and paradoxically I only saw the world through the lens of this research. I made inaccurate judgments, illogical conclusions and was irrational about irrationality because I filtered my beliefs through the literature on decision-making – the same literature, I remind you, that warns against the power of latching onto beliefs. Meanwhile, I naively believed that knowledge of cognitive biases made me epistemically superior to my peers (just like knowing Sartre made me more authentic).

Only later did I realize that learning about decision-making gives rise to what I term the confirmation bias bias, or the tendency for people to generate a narrow (and pessimistic) conception of the mind after reading literature on how the mind thinks narrowly. Biases restrict our thinking but learning about them should do the opposite. Yet you’d be surprised how many decision-making graduate students and overzealous Kahneman, Ariely and Gilbert enthusiasts do not understand this. Knowledge of cognitive biases, perhaps the most important thing to learn for good thinking, actually increases ignorance in some cases. This is the Sartre Fallacy – we think worse after learning how to think better.

Speaking of Thomas Gilovich, right around the time I became a victim ofconfirmation bias bias he gave a lecture in our psychology department. I sat in on a class he taught before his lecture and listened to him explain a few studies that I already knew from his book, which I had bought and read. Of course, I took pride in this much like a hipster at a concert bragging about knowing the band “before everyone else.” It was Sartre part II. Somehow I had learned nothing.

After his class I jumped on an opportunity to spend a few hours with him while he killed time before his lecture to the department. I’d been studying his work for months, so you might imagine how exciting this was for me. I asked him about Tversky (his adviser) and Kahneman, practically deities in my world at the time, as well as other researchers in the field. I regret not remembering a thing he said. But thanks to pen and paper I will remember the note he wrote after I asked him to sign my copy of his book: “To a kindred spirit in the quest for more rational thinking.” How foolish, I thought. Didn’t Gilovich know that given confirmation bias “more rational thinking” is impossible? After all, if biases plagued the mind how could we think rationally about irrationality?

Again, the joke was on me.

Is the Sartre Fallacy Inevitable? 

Years before my run in with Monseiur Sartre I landed a summer job in the painting business. If you’ve painted houses perhaps you ran into the same problem I did: poor planning. One summer I discovered that a one week job took closer to two weeks; a three week job lasted about a month and a half, and so on. I devised a rule of thumb: double your completion date. The problem is I didn’t stick to this heuristic even though I knew it was true. Why? Experience and knowledge do not necessarily improve judgment; we’ve seen, in fact, that sometimes the opposite occurs. The mind is stubborn – we stick to our intuitions despite the evidence.

Let’s go beyond the anecdote. In the spring of 2005 Bent Flyvbjerg, Mette K. Skamris Holm, and Søren L. Buhl published an article in Journal of the American Planning Association that presented “results from the first statistically significant study of traffic forecasts in transportation infrastructure projects.” The paper gathered data from rail and road projects undertaken worldwide between 1969 and 1998. They found that in over 90 percent of rail projects the ridership was overestimated and that 90 percent of rail and road projects fell victim to cost overrun. Worse, although it became obvious that most planners underestimate the required time and money their accuracy actually declined over the years. Today a sizable engineering feat completed on time and within budget is an imaginary one.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman describes the planning fallacy as “plans or forecasts that are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios.” Two dramatic examples come to mind. In 1957 The Sydney Opera house was estimated to cost $7 million (Australian dollars) and the completion date was set for early 1963. It opened in 1973 with a price tag of $102 million. Boston’s Big Dig was nearly one decade late and $12 billion dollars overpriced. The one exception that I can think of from the engineering world is New York’s Empire State Building, completed in 410 days, several months ahead of schedule, at $24.7 million, which is close to half of the projected $43 million.

But this does not imply that the Sartre Fallacy is unavoidable. Consider a study published in 1996. Lyle Brenner and two colleagues gave students from San Jose State University and Stanford fake legal scenarios. There were three groups: one heard from one lawyer, the second heard from another lawyer, and the third, a mock jury, heard both sides. The bad news is that even though the participants were aware of the setup (they knew that they were only hearing one side or the entire story), those who heard one-sided evidence provided more confident judgments than those who saw both sides. However, the researchers also found that simply prompting participants to consider the other side’s story reduced their bias. The deliberate, effortful, calculating System 2 is capable of rational analysis; we simply need a reason to engage it.

A clever study by Ivan Hernandez and Jesse Lee Preston provides another reason for optimism. In one experiment liberal and conservative participants read a short pro-capital punishment article. There were two conditions. The fluent condition read that article in 12-point Times New Roman font; the disfluent condition read the article in an italicized Haettenschweiler font presented in a light gray bold. It was difficult to read and that was the point. Hernandez and Preston found that participants in the later condition “with prior attitudes on an issue became less extreme after reading an argument on the issues in a disfluent format.” We run on autopilot most of the time. Sometimes offsetting biases means pausing, and giving System 2 a chance to assess the situation more carefully.

One last point. If the Sartre Fallacy was inevitable then we could not account for moral progress. The Yale psychologist Paul Bloom observes in a brief but cogent article for Nature that rational deliberation played a large part in eliminating “beliefs about the rights of women, racial minorities and homosexuals… [held] in the late 1800s.” Bloom’s colleague Steven Pinker similarity argues that reason is one of our “better angels” that helped reduce violence over the millennia:

Reason is… an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas. Once it is programmed with a basic self-interest and an ability to communicate with others, its own logic will impel it, in the fullness of time, to respect the interest of ever-increasing numbers of others. It is reason too that can always take note of the shortcomings of previous exercises of reasoning, and update and improve itself in response. And if you detect a flaw in this argument, it is reason that allows you to point it out and defend an alternative.

When Hume noted that, “reason is, and ought to be, only the slave of the passion” he was not suggesting that since irrationality is widespread we should lie back and enjoy the ride. He was making the psychological observation that our emotions mostly run the show and advising a counter strategy: we should use reason to evaluate the world more accurately in order to decide and behave better. The Sartre Fallacy is not inevitable, just difficult to avoid.

 The (Real) Socratic Problem, or Why The Sartre Fallacy Exists

This brings me to an ancient Greek, the master himself, Socrates of Athens. In a segment of Gorgias that foresees decades of modern psychological research, the erudite interlocutor observes that we always act out of a belief that what we are doing is good. This delusion is self-reinforcing. Time, experience, and more information (even opposing information) strengthen beliefs. Alas, the snub nosed Greek erroneously concluded that if we do wrong it must be because we are ignorant.

Consider a recent article published in the New York Times Magazine, an excerpt from Michael Moss’ book Salt Sugar Fat. Moss reports on a study published in 2011 that highlights Americans’ growing obesity problem. It tracked 120,877 subjects from 1986 to 2010 and found that, “every four years, the participants exercised less, watched TV more and gained an average of 3.35 pounds.” Who were these people? Each of 120,877 participants was, in fact, a health care professional presumably well informed about nutrition and how to live a healthy lifestyle. This toxic demonstration of cognitive dissonance is not unusual: smokers know smoking is bad; husbands know the detriments of an affair; thieves know the consequences of stealing; alcoholics know the perils of drinking. Phaedra was right: “We do sometimes know the good and fail to do it.”

The Socratic problem usually refers to the fact that our accounts of Socrates are second hand, a problem exacerbated by his stubborn refusal to document, with pen and papyrus, his philosophy. I want to rebrand the Socratic problem to describe his false belief – a belief that pervades the Western world today – that knowledge is necessarily a panacea.

Go back to Moss. Will readers learn that information about nutrition does not make people healthier? No. Will they realize, when his book does nothing to curb our diets, that the mind struggles to act on helpful information? No. They will learn that too much salt, sugar and fat is bad for you. And that’s it. We’re good at learning and retaining information. We’re pitiful at abstracting rules and changing behavior accordingly. Worse, we don’t learn that we don’t learn.

With this in mind, imagine your pre-bike riding days. Would a complete bike-riding manual have helped? Probably not. You needed experience. The Greeks made a similar distinction. We know from the Roman physician Galen that Menodotus of Nicomedia, a member of the Empirical School, sought practitioners who embodied techne (know-how) and notepistêmê (know-that). I’m with Menodotus on this one. I don’t want a doctor who knows how the heart works; I want a doctor who knows how to operate on the heart.

Perhaps you’re familiar with this distinction, so I’ll draw the conclusion for you: the body is much smarter than the brain. I realize that this might sound strange in an era preoccupied with “ideas.” I have in mind our obsequious attachment to those dreadful articles that promise to reveal the secrets to human creativity or intelligence and those 20-minute video clips that turn scientists into rock stars. We love simple explanations of complex things, especially brain functions. The next time you’re in a bookstore, navigate to the cognitive science section and count the number of books that begin with the words “how” or “why.” Don’t read these books.

I wouldn’t deny the mind’s capacities. But pause, for a moment, and think about the body. At one point in your life you took up a sport or performed a simple task like throwing a dart. Carrying out these skills was, believe it or not, a tremendous accomplishment, a marvel of evolution. Shakespeare observed that we humans are noble in reason, but the principle achievement of the brain is not Romeo and Juliet, or General Relativity or the Sistine Chapel; it is movement. That a baseball player can hit a 90 mph curving baseball and catch a line drive on the run is more impressive than lucid prose, scientific theorems or aesthetic prowess. Here’s Pinker again:

I would pay a lot for a robot that would put away the dishes or run simple errands, but I can’t, because all of the little problems that you’d need to solve to build a robot to do that, like recognizing objects, reasoning about the world, and controlling hands and feet, are unsolved engineering problems. They’re much harder than putting a man on the moon or sequencing the human genome. But a four-year-old solves them every time she runs across the room to carry out an instruction from her mother.

The body also remembers better than the mind. In Moonwalking With Einstein Joshua Foer makes the point that we’re horrible at remembering lists but excellent at remembering routes. Notice, for example, how easy it is to mentally traverse the route you took to elementary school. Compare that to what you remember about High School chemistry. The body doesn’t forget skills either, hence the proverb “it’s like riding a bike” while the mind forgets the vast majority of the information it obtains. The body even “remembers” the experience of being sick, which is why you’ll never contract mono, polio, or the chicken pox twice. (The wily Richard Dawkins calls a vaccination a “false memory.”)

There is an evolutionary component to this. We existed as non-thinking animals throughout most of our evolutionary history. During that time natural selection focused on how the brain might get the body to move through space safely. Using your legs to chase after food (or run from it) and your hands to eat it was more important that philosophizing. Only in the last blip of time did consciousness, abstract thought and language – the real game changer – emerged from our frontal lobes. Today Homo sapiensare the most creative and intelligent species on Earth. But it’s important to remember that the ability to move our limbs in concert is the principal biological achievement. We forget this, of course, when we pause to think about it.

Let’s return to Gorgias, the Platonic dialog eponymously named after the Greek sophist. Socrates asks Gorgias if a person who’s come to understand building is a builder and if a person who’s come to understand music a musician. Yes, Gorgias replies.

Socrates: And a person who’s come to understand medicine is a doctor, and so on and so forth. By the same token, anyone who has come to understand a given subject is described in accordance with the particular character his brand of knowledge confers. Do you agree?

Gorgias: Yes.

Socrates: So doesn’t it follow that someone who has come to understand morality is moral?

It appears that Socrates had the wrong user’s manual. The brain was designed to do – not to think and introspect. Expertise in a domain requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Spend a lifetime studying epistemology and you’ll be no wiser. Yet, thanks to Socrates and his Greek cohorts we still believe that acquiring theoretical, conceptual or factual knowledge necessarily improves judgment and behavior. And with respect to the relationship between understanding morality and acting moral, well, he was clearly unfamiliar with the Catholic Church.

The purpose of this section is to answer the question, Why is the Sartre Fallacy difficult to avoid? We’ve seen that humans did not evolve to be philosophers, which is fine except when we act like it. Every time we provide a premise, supply the inferences and come to a conclusion we expect the audience to change their minds. This style of reasoning, a direct result of the ancients, rarely changes anything. There are no guarantees that acquiring more knowledge – reading more self-help, diet, business, or decision-making books – will improve life. We’re cognitive misers; we only use System 2 if we have to, and even then we’re reluctant. The intellect is, evolutionarily speaking, the youngest addition to the human condition. We don’t know how to use it very well.

This is why the Sartre Fallacy is difficult to avoid: we don’t “do” knowledge well. Natural selection focused on the body, not the mind.

Philosophizing Without a Ph.D.

Consider one last autobiographical note before I answer the question: “How do we avoid the Sartre Fallacy?”

I conducted an independent study my senior year that focused on biases and heuristics. I lived in this literature for months, covering what seemed like every study demonstrating how we humans screw up; it was difficult not to conclude that we are hopelessly irrational. What occurred to me, however, was that the word “rational” was misleading. What’s rational is usually relative to the homo economicus perspective, in which good decisions are about surveying alternatives, estimating probabilities and optimizing self-interest. But what looks rational in one setting might be deeply irrational in another if you attribute deviations in judgments not to deficits of the mind but to the homo economicus perspective itself. That is, it might be better to think about how biases and heuristics relate to the environment rather than to logic and optimization.

Like every idea I’ve ever had, I discovered that I was not the first person to think it. Gerd Gigerenzer, one of the most important decision-making theorists of the last few decades, has made a career pursuing this line of reasoning. I remember buying his book Rationality for Mortals and finding a passage that crystalized my insight: “Violations of logical reasoning [are] interpreted as cognitive fallacies, yet what appears to be a fallacy can often also be seen as adaptive behavior, if one is willing to rethink the norm.” Consequently, I realized that if we judge behavior not relative to logic and optimization but to the physical and social environments we exist in, then I cannot understand judgment by only studying the literature on decision-making. (We’ve seen that doing so actually increases your bias.)

Why do humans see colors? For years the leading hypothesis was that color vision evolved to help us spot nutritious fruits and vegetation in the forest. But in 2006, evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi and colleagues proposed that color vision evolved to perceive oxygenation and hemoglobin variations in skin in order to detect social cues, emotions and the states of our friends or enemies. Just think about the reddening and whitening of the face called blushing and blanching. They elicit distinct physiological reactions that would be impossible without color vision.

A few years ago Changizi left Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he was professor to co-found 2AI Labs with Dr. Tim Barber. Their Boise, Idaho-based research institute, funded via technology spin-offs coming out of their work, aimed at solving foundational problems in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. The move allowed Changizi to continue to conduct academic work with more intellectual freedom and less of a reliance on grants.

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How much does environment influence intelligence? Several years ago University of Virginia Professor Eric Turkheimer demonstrated that growing up in an impoverished and chaotic household suppresses I.Q. – without nurture, innate advantages vanish. What about genes? They matter too. After decades of research most psychologists agree that somewhere between 50% and 80% of intelligence is genetic. After all, numerous studies demonstrate that identical twins raised apart have remarkably similar I.Q.’s.

A 2008 paper out of the University of Michigan turned all of this on its head. The researchers led by Susanne M. Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now at the University of Maryland, found that participants who engaged in short sessions of “cognitive training” that targeted working memory with a simple but difficult game known as the n-back task boosted a core feature of general intelligence called fluid intelligence. Crystalized intelligence improves with age and experience. Fluid intelligence, in contrast, is the capacity to make insights, solve new problems and perceive new patterns to new situations independent of previous knowledge. For decades researchers believed that fluid intelligence was immutable during adulthood because it was largely determined by genetics. The implication of the 2008 study suggested otherwise: with some cognitive training people could improve fluid intelligence and, therefore, become smarter.

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This post originally appeared on ScientificAmerican.com 

How much does environment influence intelligence? Several years ago University of Virginia Professor Eric Turkheimer demonstrated that growing up in an impoverished and chaotic household suppresses I.Q. – without nurture, innate advantages vanish. What about genes? They matter too. After decades of research most psychologists agree that somewhere between 50% and 80% of intelligence is genetic. After all, numerous studies demonstrate that identical twins raised apart have remarkably similar I.Q.’s.

A 2008 paper out of the University of Michigan turned all of this on its head. The researchers led by Susanne M. Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now at the University of Maryland, found that participants who engaged in short sessions of “cognitive training” that targeted working memory with a simple but difficult game known as the n-back task boosted a core feature of general intelligence called fluid intelligence. Crystalized intelligence improves with age and experience. Fluid intelligence, in contrast, is the capacity to make insights, solve new problems and perceive new patterns to new situations independent of previous knowledge. For decades researchers believed that fluid intelligence was immutable during adulthood because it was largely determined by genetics. The implication of the 2008 study suggested otherwise: with some cognitive training people could improve fluid intelligence and, therefore, become smarter.

This brings me to a brand new paper recently published in the journal Neuroscience by DRDC Toronto researcher and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, Oshin Vartanian. In the study, Vartanian and his team asked if working memory training improved performance on a test of divergent thinking known as the Alternate Uses Task. Psychological research demonstrates that divergent thinking “loads” on working memory, meaning that when people engage a divergent thinking task their working memory capacity is accessed accordingly. If cognitive training strengthens working memory then participants should improve their performance on divergent thinking tasks. The researchers also wondered how working memory training affected participants at the neurological level. That is, will participation in a short regiment of working memory training be correlated with greater “neural efficiency” during the Alternate Uses Task? Given that divergent thinking is linked to creativity, it also sheds light on the effect of working memory training for boosting creativity.

To answer these questions Vartanian and his team gathered 34 participants and assigned each of them to either an experimental or control group. In the first part of the study the researchers measured fluid intelligence using Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM), a hallmark of standardized tests since the 1930s. They are visual analogy problems, consisting of two patterns with three shapes and a third pattern with two shapes. The task is to select the missing shape to complete the third triad from a set of alternatives in order match the overall pattern. Participants completed as many RAPM problems in ten minutes as possible, immediately prior to and following cognitive training so the researchers could calculate a possible gain in fluid intelligence.

For the cognitive training portion of the study participants took part in three training sessions on separate days. Participants in the experimental condition completed the n-back task. Here’s how it works. On a monitor a participant sees a series of letters flash in the same location every two and a half seconds. Their task is to indicate if the letter is repeated. The first level is easy because participants must press the space bar every time they see a letter repeated on two consecutive trials (e.g., K followed by K). The second level gets harder – participants must press the space bar every time they see a letter that matches a letter presented two trials earlier. This gets even harder at level three, where they have to make matching decisions compared to three trials earlier. Meanwhile, participants in the control condition completed a 4-choice reaction time task that controlled for task engagement.

Following the RAPM and cognitive training each participant laid in an fMRI scanner and completed the Alternate Uses Task where they generated novel uses for common objects. For example, imagine a researcher asks you to generate a list of uses for a brick. You could use a brick to build a house but a more creative solution might be to use a brick to prop open a door. The purpose of the Alternate Uses Task is to test divergent thinking, an important component of creativity. In Vartanian’s study the participants had 12 seconds to generate uses of a common object, and three seconds to enter their responses using an MRI-compatible keypad. They repeated this task for 20 trials.

Vartanian and his fellow researchers found that the results mostly confirmed the original hypotheses. First, the experimental group improved their RAPM scores compared to the control group, confirming previous research that cognitive training can boost fluid intelligence. However, they did not discover a difference between the two groups with respect to the number of uses generated in the Alternate Uses Task. In other words, participants who completed the n-back tasks did not score higher on divergent thinking, suggesting that training working memory does not boost divergent thinking.

The most provocative findings were at the neurological level. Namely, activation in the ventrolateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, areas of the brain associated with divergent thinking, was much lower during the generation phase of the Alternative Uses Task in the experimental group. This means that even though working memory training and subsequent gains in fluid intelligence did not transfer to better performance on the Alternate Uses Task, participants who engaged in the cognitive training were neurally more efficient during divergent thinking. In other words, just like a long-distance runner uses his lungs and muscle’s more efficiently, participants who practiced the n-back task used less neural resources in the divergent thinking task compared to participants in a control condition.

Gains in fluid intelligence moreover predicted lower activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. However, Vartanian reminded me in a recent email that results are correlational. “Drawing a causal link between working memory training and neural efficiency requires more experimentation.”

It’s still unclear if gains from working memory training “transfer” to other tasks. Researchers know that training working memory improves working memory capacity. The question is if working memory training improves cognitive performance across the board just like working out improves your fitness in general. Vartanian says reliable evidence for this transfer effect is the “holy grail everyone is after” even though, he clarified, not every lab has found that the n-back task leads to an increase in fluid intelligence.

All of this brings up the question: What is intelligence anyway? I stated at the outset that intelligence has a genetic component but environment plays a vital role as well. It’s more complicated than that, of course. Consider the Flynn effect. It demonstrates that I.Q. scores have been rising in many parts of the world since 1930. Are people getting smarter or are they just getting better at taking I.Q. tests? The idea that I.Q. is the measurement for intelligence is waning. Yes, I.Q. correlates with success later on in life but it’s unclear what, exactly, it measures. Compounding these queries is the question of multiple intelligences. Researchers like Harvard’s Howard Gardner believe that intelligence isn’t a single thing like a black box in the mind but a series of distinct mental capacities. This makes sense to me – I can write articles on cognitive science but a calculus problem makes me shiver – but the evidence for this line of reasoning is spotty.

Another contentious area of study concerns the relationship between divergent thinking and creativity. Psychologists have historically equated divergent thinking with creativity because divergent thinking is about generating multiple solutions to a single problem, free-flow thinking, and originality. This is true, but like intelligence this paradigm doesn’t address what creativity is in the first place. Today more and more researchers believe that performance on divergent thinking tasks is merely one piece of the creativity pie. This is why a number of creativity researchers are advocating for a broader definition of creativity as well as a shift away from the idea that creative “types” exist, a false suggestion that people are either creative or not.

One of those researchers is Scott Barry Kaufman, NYU Adjunct Professor of Psychology and author of the up and coming Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. “Pathbreaking creativity requires many years of acquiring a deep knowledge base from which you can draw to make novel connections,” Kaufman explained to me. “Since divergent thinking tests rely so heavily on working memory and fluid reasoning, they don’t allow people to bring their rich database of life experiences to the task. Psychologists are missing out on a large chunk of their creative potential because creativity can be manifested in many ways. By solely judging a person’s intelligence or creativity based on a single decontextualized testing session, you are ignoring that person’s unique mind, and the possibility for that mind to display incredible cognitive feats when allowed to express itself in its own way over an extended period of time.”

Intelligence and creativity are thorny components of our psychologies. Studying them is difficult, defining them even harder. But the overall trend in cognitive science is positive. Researchers like Vartanian and Kaufman are broadening our conception of intelligence and creativity with innovative research and fresh ideas. This is vital. The future of education will depend not just on policy but what we know about how the brain learns, makes insights and solves problems. “Ideally, in educational and other applied settings we would have the ability to train individuals on a few core abilities and then observe performance benefits in many target activities” said Vartanian. “For this to happen, we first need a good understanding of the core abilities that contribute to the desired outcomes, and then we need to differentiate between what can and cannot be trained.”

Image: Renato Ganoza

Situations Matters: Understanding How Context Transforms Your Worldis a book by Tufts University Professor of Psychology Sam Sommers. I had the pleasure of conducting a interview with Sommers to celebrate and promote the recently released paperback edition. Below is the transcript. I recommend checking out his book. It is an excellent read.

McNerney: Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World is a reaction to the idea that personalities are immutable, that the individual changes the situation but not the other way around. Or, as you put it in the prologue, “individuals’ personalities – yours and mine included – are not as stable as we think they are. We’re more influenced by those around us than we’d like to believe. Even our private sense of identity is highly context-dependent.” Where does the idea that the self is an unchanging entity come from? Does it go all the way back to Platonic philosophy or Cartesian dualism? Is it the individualism that defines the Western world? Maybe genetics or evolutionary psychology? Or is it that situations affect us at the unconscious level, making it nearly impossible to realize how, exactly, context shapes us?

Sommers: Yes, the real moral of the book is that personality is overrated. Why do we put so much stock in the idea of immutable character? Well, I think you hit on a lot of the explanations in your question. The world is a frighteningly unpredictable place–it’s reassuring to at least be able to hang our hats on the idea that the people around us are reliably predictable entities. As in, this guy does X because he’s simply an X kind of person. This tendency is, as you suggest, often operating outside of conscious awareness. And it’s also particularly pronounced in the quote-unquote Western world, in which individuality is a core value. There are these fascinating studies where you show Western participants (say, Americans) an image and ask them what they see, and their responses indicate that they’re focusing on the action up front at the expense of the backdrop or surrounding context. Respondents from Eastern cultures (say, Japanese), however, attend more to the context in these scenes, presumably because they also do the same in navigating their daily social world: more collectivist cultures tend to place less emphasis on what makes an individual stand out from others, and more on social roles, social connectivity, and so forth. Your question about the role of genetics in all of this is especially interesting. As technology continues to develop, I think the allure of genetic explanations for social behavior also grows–there’s this notion that somehow we’re finally going to be able to crack the code of why people do what they do. Take the tragic school shooting a few weeks ago in Newtown, Connecticut. A few days ago, news comes out that there are plans to examine the DNA of the shooter to look for clues as to why he did what he did. Of course, most of the explanations that people have bandied about for his actions are not ones for which any sort of clear genetic marker could be found. But it’s an appealing (or at least reassuring, perhaps) idea in many respects, that if we can somehow find something wrong with how this person was programmed, so to speak, we can then write off the behavior as a complete aberration that no one could have possibly done anything to prevent, etc. So I have a feeling that our tendency to think of each other in these terms of stable personality is only likely to increase in the future.

McNerney: In the first chapter you discuss the idea of WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. You sum it up like this: “We assume that the behavior we observe of another person at a particular point in time provides an accurate glimpse of the ‘true product’ within.” For example, the unhelpful ticket agent at the airport is rude, the colleague who won’t return e-mails is lazy, and the waiter who screws up our order is incompetent. It’s true that these are unfair judgments. But the brain’s ability to make snap judgments and simplify the world is remarkable. WYSIWYG is, it seems, a double-edged sword: it sacrifices accurate judgments for a coherent picture of reality. With this in mind, Is WYSIWYG ultimately harmful or helpful?

Sommers: Agreed. We walk a fine line between making quick decisions/impressions that allow us to cut through the noise of a complex social world and the risk of sacrificing too much accuracy in the name of this efficiency. So it’s a cop-out answer (much like the one offered by every psychology professor who ever spent an entire semester regaling her students with the age-old nature vs. nurture debate only to come to the final day’s conclusion of: ah, turns out it’s a little bit of both). But, indeed, it’s a little bit of both. WYSIWYG helps us, but also prevents us from reaching our full potential as astute observers and prognosticators of human nature.  I’ve had a lot of people ask me, upon reading my book, can’t you go too far in the other direction, spending too much time or effort pondering context until you get to paralysis by analysis? Yes, absolutely. What I’d suggest, though, is that you need both: the ability to make quick decisions, but also the ability to step back and take a more reasoned, less emotional look at what’s really going on in an interaction. Think about the individuals out there who are really good at “reading people.” The successful salesperson, the engaging public speaker, the effective therapist… they’re able to get a good, quick read on how things are going, how their message is being received, and so on. But they also recognize the multifaceted nature of the environments in which they operate and they’re able to refrain from jumping to premature conclusions regarding the “type of person” they’re interacting with. Again, I realize I’m giving the cop-out answer here.  But I think it’s also the right answer: a little bit of both.

McNerney: Portions of your book offer pragmatic advice for navigating the social world. In the epilogue you tell the story of trying to find a parking space in a crowded mall parking lot. You watch a man get into his car but he doesn’t start it. Is he being a jerk? Should I honk? You consider more realistic possibilities: he is on an important call; he is waiting for someone to join him. 45 minutes later you discover the man talking to a tow truck driver: his car, it turned out, was not starting (you also find out that he’s the father of one of your daughter’s classmates!). The story reminds us that WYSIWYG causes us to assume the worst – to not give others the benefit of the doubt. Does learning about WYSIWYG curb this negative tendency? And are there specific strategies we can adopt?

Sommers: Learning about this tendency is definitely powerful. I liken it to finding out the secret to a magic trick (or the surprise ending to one of those old M. Night Shyamalan movies). Once it’s been pointed out to you, you can go back and look at the same scenarios again, but it’s hard to view them the same way you used to. The magic trick is still cool, but now you’re focusing on what the magician is doing with his other hand rather than falling for the misdirection (or the movie is still engaging, but you find yourself saying, wait, Haley Joel Osment is riding a city bus around Philadelphia on his own, apparently talking to himself the whole time, and this isn’t a problem for anyone else in the vicinity?). One of the chapters in the book focuses on crowd behavior, and specifically the multiple forces that typically make us more apathetic when in a group setting. This isn’t the way we usually think about apathetic behavior–we read about, for example, the tourist who keels over on the subway and rides iaround for hours, dead, without anyone noticing or doing anything to intervene, and our immediate reaction is to indict the fellow passengers (or perhaps city dwellers everywhere) as chronically indifferent people. When you learn about the ways in which context often makes all of us, you and me included, less likely to get involved in the affairs of others, it changes how you react in this type of situation in the future. You drive by the stranded motorist and, rather than assuming someone else will stop to help, you at least ponder whether there’s something you should do to lend a hand. And so it goes for a variety of topics covered in the book. If we force ourselves to pay attention to context or to truly and genuinely consider an interaction from someone else’s point of view, it makes us more effective people–better able to persuade others, to predict how others will react, and so on.

McNerney: I find it fascinating that we don’t view ourselves through the lens of WYSIWYG. In my own eyes I am dynamic; I know that I act differently depending on the context. I am more rambunctious when I am with my friends on a Saturday night. I am more patient and thoughtful when I am with my girlfriend’s parents. And when I make a mistake – when I am rude or lazy – I’m generous when I evaluate my behavior – I always give myself the benefit of the doubt. Why the double standard? Are we, as human beings, programmed to be self-reassuring?

Sommers: I mentioned above that the world can be frighteningly unpredictable. It can also be pretty threatening. Around almost every corner lurks at least the risk of embarrassment, frustration, or failure. Accordingly, most of us get pretty good at developing strategies to buffer the ego against such threats, much of the time through unconscious processes. So there is a school of thought in psychology that “normal” daily functioning requires a bit of self-deception–the positive illusions here and there that help us get through the tough patches in life: we see ourselves as being better than we really are on a variety of dimensions, we write off our setbacks as the results of fluke or other external causes, etc. Of course, once again, there’s a fine line here.  Too much self-distortion is a problem; if we always shrug off negative feedback, we never seize the opportunity for actual self-improvement. But this ego defense can provide us with the short-term buffer we need to get through the initial blow of negative realization or feedback, giving us time to marshal the resources necessary for a genuine effort at making changes.  I often think of the example of how I feel when I get editorial comments or reviews back on something I’ve written. The knee-jerk response is defensiveness: oh, they didn’t get what I meant here; obviously, this is just lost on them. So I put the reviews away for a bit, and when I go back to them a week later, only then am I actually able to see, begrudgingly, that they’re raising good points, that I could’ve been clearer in this section, that this other section doesn’t really work at all…  The ego-protective stuff often helps grant us the cooling-off period we often need before real change or self-improvement is even a possibility.

McNerney: I’m originally from Minnesota, a state where people are polite and rarely use their horns to resolve traffic predicaments. Now I live in New York City where my “Minnesota-Nice” is nearly non-existent; it is, sadly, counterproductive when it comes to getting from point A to point B. I’m tempted to conclude, especially after readingSituations Matter, that what defines us is location, location, location. But that’s not exactly what you conclude. I am sure it is impossible to put a number on it, but what has more power over thoughts, action and the self, location or our biology?

Sommers: Hah. I was born in New York City, but moved to the Midwest as a toddler. Now back on the East Coast, my wife is consistently amused by my version of Midwestern-Nice. In fact, when we lived in Michigan for 6 years when I was in graduate school, she (a native Bostonian) found the whole scene unnerving. As in, why are these people at the grocery store making eye contact with me, smiling, and saying hello? So there is, indeed, a pretty strong location, location, location effect. And there’s no age-delimited critical period for it either: now I live in Boston and I have definitely gotten more aggressive as a driver. Frankly, people here suck at driving. But I chalk a lot of that up to (surprise, surprise), context. One-way streets, unlabeled streets, streets that somehow don’t show up on Google Maps, total lack of anything resembling a street grid… that’ll turn you into an impatient and hyperaggressive driver very quickly. You’re right, it’s hard to quantify. And I’m certainly not arguing in the book that we lack biological drives or genetic predispositions. But what I keep coming back to is our default of putting too much stock in those internal/physiological/genetic explanations. Actually, region of origin might not be the best example, because in many respects that is a context we recognize: there are pretty common stereotypes about New Yorkers, Californians, Midwesterners, Southerners, etc. But on the whole, we just keep overlooking contextual influences when we ruminate on human nature. My goal for the book is to even out those scales a bit. To give people a nudge toward the underrated, situational side of the explanatory ledger, which makes us more balanced perceivers of the social world around us.

McNerney: My favorite chapter is the one of love. From The Theban Plays to The Notebook and Love Actually, literature is obsessed with romantic opposites (think pairs of star-crossed lovers). Empirical research on love paints a different picture. We are attracted to people who share our interests and proximity matters. You quote an Onion headline that captures this perfectly. “18-Year-Old Miraculously Finds Soulmate in Hometown.” If the relevant research demonstrates that opposites rarely attract and that we like familiarity (both geographical and physical), why, then, do so many books and plays take the opposite perspective? And are classic and contemporary stories of love the reason we forget that context plays a major role when it comes to two people falling in love?

Sommers: There’s a bit of the chicken and egg there, right?  As in, sure, folk stories and media help shape how we think about love. But then again, they also reflect how we already think about these issues. So we think about love in these terms of soulmates and mystical connections, in part because it’s the same WYSIWYG tendency all over again. But also because it’s a more engaging and interesting story that way, isn’t it? To think that some of the most important determinants of the most intimate relationships in your life were things like which dorm the college housing office assigned you to, which cubicle you were given at work, which gym you decided to join… it’s not that romantic and it’s certainly too prosaic to get your script for a new Kate Hudson vehicle greenlit. Like I mention in the book, people don’t always enjoy thinking about love and intimate relationships in these empirically-based terms. Back to my wife once more, like I write in the book, she hates that chapter. She likes the soulmate notion of falling in love. So I’m treading on thin ice here a bit. But I actually think the more context-dependent view of attraction and how we fall in love is liberating, not depressing. The notion that we’re flexible enough to form important, meaningful, and rewarding close relationships in almost any environment is a good thing. If happiness in relationships was really all about finding that needle of a soulmate in the haystack of the real world… man, that’s really the depressing or daunting proposition, isn’t it? It always seems to work out OK for Kate Hudson after 85 minutes, but the simple probability of it all suggests that the rest of us wouldn’t be as lucky.

McNerney: Are you working on another book? What are you currently researching? And has post-Situations Matter work changed your mind about any of the ideas in the book?

Sommers: For now, this book (and, of course, the day job) still keeps me busy. One of the best outcomes of writing it, for me, has been getting invited to talk with a wide range of audiences I wouldn’t have otherwise. Some academic crowds. Some corporate audiences, where I’ve talked about how context helps explain unethical behavior or about the science of diversity in organizations. I got to speak to a behavioral analysis group at the FBI (super cool), do a TEDx talk, and so on. That’s all been really fun. And who knows–it may all lead to an idea for the next book as well. In terms of my research lab, we’ve been focusing on the contextual factors that shape social/cognitive outcomes in intergroup interactions. Diversity is a big buzzword these days, and the question of how best to achieve and promote it can be a controversial one.  What we’re studying, though, are the observable effects of diversity on group and individual performance. So when does a diverse composition predict positive outcomes? When does it cause complications for group morale/cohesion? Some of these studies are lab-based–for example, in which we vary the racial composition of pairs working on problem-solving tasks. In another study, we followed college freshmen over the course of their first year to see whether students assigned to live with a same-race roommate exhibited different tendencies than students assigned to live with an other-race roommate. The findings were really interesting: not only did living with an other-race roommate affect attitudes/ideologies a semester later, but it also rendered students less anxious and uncomfortable in subsequent interactions with an outgroup member they’d never met before. In other words, living with someone of another race/ethnicity made students more likely to have positive intergroup interactions with strangers as well. In short, different studies exploring how diverse settings influence social perception, cognition, and behavior.

Thanks Sam!

Philippa Perry is a British psychotherapist and writer. She is also the author of How To Stay Sane, a charming new book and a recent edition to The School of Life series, “a new enterprise offering good ideas for everyday life.” Although you’ll find Perry’s book in the self-help section some of what she writes about relates to creativity. She was nice enough to answer a few questions.

Sam: You say that good stress “keeps our brain plastic.” What do you mean, plastic? And is a “plastic brain” a “creative brain”?

Philippa: It used to be thought that you stopped making new neural connections in your youth and from then on your brain was fixed and it was downhill all the way. But in fact as we know from our own experience we can keep on learning and learning means changing our brain on a physical level. Neurogenesis continues throughout life and we have the capacity to establish new neural pathways and strengthen existing ones. Our brains do not have to be fixed, they can be plastic. After a stroke we can re-learn how to talk, because by practicing we can establish different pathways in the brain, circumnavigating the damaged part. But we don’t have to have suffered brain damage to take advantage of the plastic nature of our brains.

Recent evidence from scientific researchers at Yale, Harvard, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that meditation can allow us to “grow bigger brains.” It is thought meditation can build up new pathways between neurons. Meditators are shown to have thickening in parts of the brain structure that deal with attention, memory and sensory functions. This was found to be more noticeable in older, more practiced meditators than in younger adults which is interesting because this structure usually  tends to get thinner as we age. Meditation is focused attention and the more we practise focusing our brains the more connections we build up. In other words if we keep practicing mental skills it is likely we can strengthen neural connections and make new connections.

“Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain and represents evolution’s invention to enable the nervous system to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences. Dynamic shifts in the strength of preexisting connections across distributed neural networks, changes in task-related cortico-cortical and cortico-subcortical coherence and modifications of the mapping between behavior and neural activity take place in response to changes in afferent input or efferent demand. Such rapid, ongoing changes may be followed by the establishment of new connections through dendritic growth and arborization … Plasticity is the mechanism for development and learning…” Source

As to a ‘creative brain’ I’m not exactly sure what you mean by this, but possibly it means a brain belonging to someone who can come up with new ideas, problem solve and generate new things. This is something that more or less anyone can do and they can become skilled in it, and like any skill gets better with practise. I haven’t extensively researched creativity on its own but my fantasy is that in order to be creative I need to allow space for my unconscious thoughts to filter up through into my conscious ones to allow for an internal dialogue that encourages new ideas to form rather than be dismissed. The more I can do this, the more confident I am in the process.

As you seem interested in creativity I’ll share with you the only work I did specifically on creative process:

In 2008, I ran a 5 day therapy group once for art students and their lecturers in the University of East London in which I used Gestalt experiments so that each participant could become more aware of how they were each creative. I found that there tended to be generally main sorts of creativity. There were those whose ideas sprung from their work as they did it, and those who planned their work out beforehand. We called these, rather clumsily, Organickers and Organisers. Using visualisation techniques to get participants to remember how they played as children we found out that Organisers had tended to set up their games first and Organickers had made them up as they went along. It was useful for the staff because if they themselves were an Organiser and they tried to teach an Organicker that the way to success is to plan, they actually did more harm than good and vice versa. But we did experiment with using the two different ways of approaching invention without saying one was better than the other so they could try the other approach and some of them expanded how they were creative to take on the other way of approaching their work without assigning value judgments to either approach, but just having the different approaches like different tools. And being more aware of how they approached creative work allowed them more choice about how they went about it.

It seems whether we have a tendency towards being flexible or structured affects how we create, how we parent, how we work. The psychoanalyst Professor Joan Raphael-Leff in her book the psychological processes of childbearing identified two types of mothers – regulators and facilitators that also seem to follow this pattern. I was listening to Professor Jared Diamond on the radio recently arguing against scientists setting up a hypothesis before looking at the data to see what emerges from it and I thought, Ah, classic organicker!

The extreme of flexibility is chaos and the extreme of being structured is rigid and staying sane, or indeed using your creativity, is about being aware of these extremes and steering yourself to areas where you work best which usually tend to be more in the middle than at either extreme edge.

So whether you plan or whether you flow in order to be creative probably isn’t the point. The point is to keep practicing to maintain neural pathways and to establish new ones by learning new skills.

Sam: Could you briefly explain the Comfort Zone Exercise? It seems like most people don’t push intellectual, athletic, or social boundaries because they gravitate towards what’s comfortable. How can the Comfort Zone Exercise help? And can we use it to boost creative output?

Philippa: The Comfort Zone Exercise is straightforward. Get a large piece of plain paper and draw a circle in the middle. Inside the circle write examples of activities that you feel completely comfortable doing. Around the edge of the circle write down examples of activities that you can do but that you have to push yourself a little bit to do – those activities that may make you nervous in some way, but not so much as to stop you doing them. In the next band write activities that you like to do but find it difficult to get up the courage to do. Draw another circle around this ring of activities. After that write down those things you are far too scared to try but would like to do. You can create as many circles as you like. The point of the Comfort Zone Exercise is for you to consider what you are comfortable with and what you are not, and then to experiment with expanding your area of comfort.

I think there is probably something evolutionary in that we are drawn to the easiest option. But in our age of convenience, cars, ready meals and off the peg mean that we are in danger of being mentally under stretched. When we had to survive on our wits, gather and kill our food from scratch and be more at the mercy of our environment than we are today, we probably had enough challenge to keep our brains healthy. My theory is if we are not using our brains’ capacity for challenge it feels to me as though it atrophies like an unused muscle. What I’ve found with myself and with clients who use the comfort zone model is that when we expand out in one direction we find, with practise, that it’s easier to expand out in all directions. I think this is because a sense of achievement improves general confidence and self-esteem. The way I’ve drawn it in the book, I hope shows that the idea is that you take small manageable steps.

If someone is depressed they tend to retreat within the inner circle of their comfort zone which in the longer term, may contribute to exacerbating a problem rather than soothing it and if not seeking to expand the comfort zone becomes the norm. The trouble is if we take no new steps to try a new challenge, our comfort zone doesn’t seem just to stay still, but retract. I haven’t drawn on specific scientific evidence for this, and anecdotal experience is not evidence. However, it is merely what I’ve come to believe from my own experience and my work as a psychotherapist.

Sam: You have a section in your book about relating to others where you say that, “solitary confinement is one of the most brutal, most stressful punishments we inflict on our fellow humans. If we are to stay sane, we must not inflict it upon ourselves.” It seems like this is true in the context of creativity, where new research is debunking the idea of the lone genius and emphasizing the important role other people play in the creative process. So I put that question to you: What role do other people play in creativity?

Philippa: I get excited just thinking about that question. Two brains are better than one. You’ve twice the brain capacity and you have two sets of experiences and genes to bring to any challenge. For example, in posing me these questions to think about my theories through the lens of creativity, you are facilitating me to think about things from a new angle for me. I find other people inspiring. If I think about my work as a psychotherapist, being in collaboration, is what it is mainly about. It is about using a relationship to get unstuck. And in order for this to work, there usually needs to be not just the one way impact of the therapist impacting the patient, but a mutual impact.

There are probably times where the creative process is not helped by collaboration. For example, I’d say sometimes an artist’s vision may get blurred when subjected to a committee because an artwork is usually an expression of something unconscious that is better left in the realm of one person’s unconscious if it is to speak to another person’s unconscious. But there may be a stage even in art work where collaboration improves the product. For example I wrote my graphic novel, Couch Fiction, on my own but then collaborated with a designer to make it look better. For the story I needed to be on my own, but for how I presented it, I wanted help.

If you look at the acknowledgement page of any published book, I’ve never see anyone write, ‘I’m thanking no-one, I did this entirely by myself”!

Sam: You mention that learning new subjects builds new connections in the brain and improves our lives. I hear a lot of people say that they want to take a class in X, take up a new hobby and learn something new. Why is it so hard to act on these desires? Do you have any advice for people who seek wisdom and new intellectual endeavors but have trouble making the required effort?

Philippa: Beginning a new habit, or ending an old one can feel like letting go of a rope that swings a mile above the ground. So we feel reluctant to let go, after all, we’ve survived so far doing what we’ve done, why risk it. But if we do risk it, if we do let go of the rope, we find the ground was only one inch below our feet anyway. That mile we felt was there, was only in our heads.

And do I have evidence to substantiate this? Probably many a psychotherapy case study will bear it witness. But it’s a theory and like all theories should be held lightly.

Our emotional map is laid down mainly in relationship with our earliest caregiver in the first couple of years of life. If we think of our brains as a map, those early roads are like grooves, tram tracks, easy to fall into. That paths between these roads/tram tracks get grown over with brambles from being unused so if you change a behaviour  – say becoming more reflective and less reactive – or maybe the other way round – but a change in any rate, for the old behaviour you have the deep grooves that are difficult to climb out of and the new behaviour is hard like breaking your way through brambles. But after you have cleared the path and walked along it a few times a path begins to emerge and you may begin to wear a groove in it. And perhaps the old road gets grown over a bit.

I have noticed though the old way never gets grown over enough, because under the wrong sort of stress (panic or dissociation) people tend to slip up and go along the old road before they realise what they’ve done and climb out of it again. A relapse though, doesn’t mean you’ll never walk down the path you prefer. But I think relapses are almost an inevitable part of any course of self-development.

Sam: The final section in your book, before the conclusion, is a titled “What’s the Story?” It’s about rewriting your life’s narrative to generate new meaning and purpose. I’ve spoken to a lot about people who are reluctant to be creative because they are self-described “not creative-types.” The science shows virtually anyone can be creative. How can we change our life’s narrative to get the creative juices flowing?

Philippa: Some of us (all of us?!) have a self-narratives that appear to work against us, for example: “I’m not creative” or “I’m no good”, or “Relationships are for other people.” Such toxic messages become  self-fulfilling prophecies. The upside of this is that uncertainty, which many of us find unsettling, is lessened. Its as though we prefer the worse possible outcome rather than be in a state of not knowing. Challenging self-fulfilling negative prophecy takes courage. It means hoping and to hope is to risk disappointment. If you start from a position of I’m a no-hoper, in a paradoxical kind of way you are not risking being vulnerable. But in order to stretch ourselves we do need to experience the vulnerability of not knowing the outcome. When we can become comfortable with this, that’s one less thing in the way of self-fulfillment.

We can decide and aim for a direction and steer the course of our lives, or we can drift and be blown about by a breeze. That breeze can be quite subtle. That’s why I include the genogram exercise* in the back of the book because using that we can discover many habits that we think are our choices but in fact they are merely our inheritance by which I mean we may have unthinkingly adopted our ancestors’ choices and their stories. Some of these stories may still work for us but there is also a likelihood that many will be outdated. Once you are aware of how you respond, how you make relationships, how you tackle challenge and what your core and covert beliefs are you are in a position to make changes if you need to, or make a choice of not changing, knowing that it is a choice rather than an automatic response.

Thanks Philippa!  

Check out two videos of Philippa speaking about her book.

And here is another link to her book.

*A genogram is like a family tree, but you include how your ancestors made and maintained their principle relationships and include some their emotional history. Or indeed it could be used for tracing ancestors’ patterns for problem solving or creativity.

In 1950, the American psychologist Joy P. Guilford delivered a lecture to the American Psychological Association (APA) calling for a scientific focus on creativity. Psychology knew little about creativity at the time. Years earlier, during WWII, the Air Force commissioned Guilford, then a psychologist at USC, to identify pilots who would respond to emergencies with original insights to save themselves and the plane. IQ was a popular measurement but it did not capture the type of thinking that generated novel solutions to urgent predicaments. Studying pilots led Guilford to a few insights he shared with his colleagues at the APA in 1950. First, creativity is not equivalent to intelligence. Second, divergent thinking is central to the concept of creativity. Third, we can develop tests to measure divergent thinking skills. Guilford’s remarks encouraged questions the academy is still having today: What is the relationship between creativity and intelligence? How do we measure creativity? And what, exactly, is creativity?

Unfortunately, Guilford’s ideas did not give rise to widespread research in creativity. Psychologists neglected the domain throughout the second half of the 20th century with notable exceptions including Dean Keith Simonton, Howard Gardner, Teresa Amabile and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It was a fringe subject because no one saw any practical applications; acquiring grant money was therefore difficult.

The 21st century is witnessing a renaissance in creativity in both the lab and the pages of popular books and magazines. “Creativity is a topic at many conferences and many grad students are getting excited about the subject,” says Scott Barry Kaufman, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University. “2012 was a good year for creativity research, journals devoted to creativity published a lot of great work and other fields weighed in.”

The most newsworthy research came from cognitive psychologists researching creativity “boosters”. Jennifer Wiley’s lab at the University of Illinois at Chicagofound that a certain dose of alcohol helped participants solve tricky word problems. Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks demonstrated that undergrads were better at solving insight-based problems when they tested during their least optimal time. This means that night owls did better in the morning while morning larks did better in the afternoon. Counter-intuitive findings like these scattered psychology journals and made for catchy headlines in the press.

The neuroscience of creativity is flourishing. In 2008 the journal PNAS published a paper by researchers from the University of Michigan demonstrating that participants who played a difficult working memory game known as the n-BACK task scored higher on tests of a fundamental cognitive ability known as fluid intelligence: the capacity to solve new problems, to make insights and see connections independent of previous knowledge. In other words, the task made people smarter. Oshin Vartanian, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, explained that a lot of researchers are excited about this finding. “The 2008 paper has had a profound effect on how creativity researchers think about creativity. Now scientists are working on replicating the results and figuring out if intelligence gained from the n-BACK task transfers to other domains.” The hope is that “cognitive training” will help children and adults boost creative output. “The application of this research is probably the most exciting idea in the cognitive science and neuroscience of creativity,” says Vartanian.

Cognitive flexibility, the ability to switch between thinking about two concepts or consider multiple perspectives simultaneously, is also a popular topic in the neuroscience world. Darya Zabelina, a graduate student at Northwestern University who studies creativity informed me that, “a lot of people are studying cognitive flexibility from a lot of different perspectives. It will be one of the topics researchers will continue to focus on in 2013.”

Paul Silvia is a Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina who researches creativity and aesthetics, among other topics. According to Silvia, “film and creativity is going to become popular; maybe music and creativity as well.” He is currently working on a paper co-authored with Emily Nusbaum that looks at unusual aesthetic states such as awe, the chills, and crying.

Countless popular psychology books that either focused on or mentioned creativity were published in 2012. Susan Cain lambasted brainstorming and “GroupThink” in her bestseller and introvert manifesto Quiet. Drawing on a wide body of robust research she reminded our hyper social world that working alone is usually better than working in groups in terms of productivity and creativity. Dan Ariely’s book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty contains a chapter on the relationship between dishonesty and creativity – honesty might not be good for creativity. The Power Of Habit by Charles Duhigg made some important suggestions for creativity: if you’re in a rut, try changing your routine. The elephant in the room is Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: The Science of Creativity, which the public gobbled up. Scientists in the field rightly expressed concerns about how Lehrer portrayed and interpreted some of the science but they are also happy that good science writers are attracted to the field. Unfortunately, Lehrer got pegged for plagiarizing and inventing Bob Dylan quotes. Kaufman said it best: “When people started doubting the veracity of that book, they started doubting the veracity of the science.”

Given that the relationship between the science of creativity and the media will continue to evolve, it will be interesting to see how the media’s portrayal of creativity affects the research. Starting with Gladwell’s Blink or Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics, the public began to expect counter-intuitive results from cognitive science. Now we live in an era where readers of science books on human nature expect clever psychological studies to explain every nook and cranny of our complex nature. This trend is good because it gets otherwise uninterested lay readers excited about cognitive science; Thinking Fast and Slow, Incognito, and others were bestsellers. However, the popularity of these books may create a bad system of incentives for researchers, in which researchers are motivated to publish results just to create a stir at the expense of sound research techniques and less provocative but more important research. (There’s nothing wrong with provocative results of course. Done properly, counter-intuitive findings are vital to any field because they force us to think differently.)*

I’d like to see more researchers active online in the future. My educated guess is that only about one percent of cognitive scientists (professors, grad students, etc.) are blogging or tweeting. This is a problem for three reasons. First, the Internet is an excellent medium for spreading information, including research papers. Consider a project by Melissa Terras, the Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. She put 26 of her articles originally published in refereed journals online for free via UCL’s Open Access Repository. She wrote blog posts and used Twitter to promote them. It helped. “Most of my papers, before I blogged and tweeted them, had one to two downloads, even if they had been in the repository for months (or years, in some cases). Upon blogging and tweeting, within 24 hours, there were on average seventy downloads of my papers.”

Second, pseudoscience, “neurobabble,” and folk psychology flourish on the Internet. We need more experts to set the record straight. “The hard part,” Silvia told me, “is many professors aren’t good at doing that. It’s just not natural for us to ‘grab’ the public.” Not everyone is Carl Sagan or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but it’s counterproductive for scientists to trench themselves in the academy. I hope creativity researchers will continue to make a larger online presence in 2013. We need them to keep writers like me honest.

Third, we need researchers to help promote the science of creativity to a wider audience. “I know a lot of really careful, good researchers in the field of the neuroscience of creativity, but no one is talking about them,” Kaufman tells me. “These thoughtful researchers should think about writing for the popular sphere and writers should pay attention to them more. There is so much exciting stuff going on in the field of creativity that most popular books don’t address.”

I’m optimistic about next year. Creativity researchers will continue to produce great research and improve our understanding of creativity as well as methods to measure it. In the spirit of Ken Robinson’s celebrated TED talk (now with over 13 million hits) we should broaden our conception of creativity; it is diverse and anyone can tap into it, even adults. Science writers will continue to write about creativity and the general public will continue to enjoy reading about it. Let’s strengthen the relationship between the academy and the journalism world, keeping in mind how we can use social media to promote the science of creativity and correct misconceptions about it (i.e., that people either are or not ‘creative’). This is important for education, where creativity research is especially useful, although it has implications for every industry.

It’s unclear where, exactly, the science of creativity will go next year, but the most interesting discoveries surely await us.

Full disclosure, Scott is also my colleague at The Creativity Post.

* This paragraph reiterates a point I made in collaboration with Dave Nussbaum, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, on a previous post. 

Image via Tatiana12/Flickr