Accentuating The Negative

This is one I wrote for The New York Times back before I started this blog.  But it still applies, and, yes, I am still grunting.

One of the most daunting and widely repeated insights from recent social research holds, in essence, that your marriage is doomed if you and your spouse can’t muster up five positive interactions for every negative one.

“Five seems like a lot,” I suggested to a friend, who promptly rattled off five nice things he had done for his wife before leaving the house that morning to go for a run. It was easy stuff once you put your mind to it, he said, like making the coffee and getting the newspaper.

“Gee, that’s terrific,” I replied. And I immediately started thinking of his marriage as “The Gottman Wars,” after the University of Washington psychologist, John Gottman, who came up with the five-to-one ratio. I imagined my insufferable friend and his wife creeping around the house before dawn desperately racking up positives to cushion the big fat negative that was burning a hole in their hearts. Meanwhile, I was having trouble getting my wife to accept that

Impression Management 101

I watched the news without sound at the gym last night and was impressed by how NBC anchor Brian Williams always manages to keep the inside of his right eyebrow cocked up, to look like an inquiring reporter.  It is almost as good as the real thing.  Does he do exercises for that?

You can read one of my past articles about facial expressions here, and a profile of the founder of the science of facial expressions in my book The Ape in the Corner Office.

 

 

Powerful People Live Large

A new study finds that the psychological experience of power makes people feel taller than they are.  The paper begins with snarky promise, quoting  BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, who was referring to the victims of the largest oil spill ever when he said “We care about the small people.”  Here’s how the paper starts:

Height is an oft used metaphor for power: Powerful people “feel like the big man on campus” and “people look up to them.” Development psychologists have suggested that a metaphorical association between power and height may take root very early as, for instance, children are confronted with taller parents who have power over them and during adolescence taller children use their strength to physically coerce smaller children. This association continues to be reinforced as taller people earn higher salaries, are more likely to be found in
higher status occupations, to emerge as leaders and to win presidential elections.

But even if they are not taller to start with, people who get power quickly come to share that high-and-mighty feeling.  Here’s the press release from Washington University:

“Although a great deal of research has shown that more physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that powerful people feel taller than they are,” says Michelle M. Duguid, PhD, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Olin Business School.

Duguid is co-author, with Jack Concalo, PhD, of Cornell University, of “Living Large: The Powerful Overestimate Their Own Height,” published in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science.

In a series of three experiments, the researchers found a definite correlation between feeling powerful and feeling tall, and even suggest that future research may want to examine whether employers should consider placing short high-ranking workers in

Dispatches from the War on Stuff

This is a short piece I wrote for the back page of the January Smithsonian:

We have a rule in my house that for every box of stuff stashed in the attic, at least one must be removed. The reality is that it would take 6—or maybe 27—boxes to make a dent in the existing inventory. But this creates a conflict with another rule against adding to the local landfill. So, for a while, I was taking things out of the attic and, for the good of the earth, hiding them in closets and under beds.

Then my grown children sat me down and said, “We love you, but…” I know how interventions work. I put on a glum face and confessed, “My name is Dad, and I am a hoarder.” And with these words, I manfully enlisted in the War on Stuff.

We are all foot soldiers in this war, though mostly AWOL. Surveys say that 73 percent of Americans enter their houses via the garage—all of them staring straight ahead to avoid seeing the stuff piled up where the cars are supposed to go. The other 27 percent never open the garage door, for fear of being crushed beneath what might come tumbling out.

It’s mostly stuff we don’t want. The treasures in my attic, for instance, include a lost Michelangelo. Unfortunately, it’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure my son misplaced when he was 8. There’s also a yearbook from a school that none of us attended and a photograph of a handsome Victorian family, who are either beloved ancestors or total strangers who happened to be in a pretty picture frame we once bought. Two barrels ostensibly contain precious family heirlooms. I suspect that, if ever opened, they will turn out like Al Capone’s vault and contain nothing more than vintage dust.

My opening salvo in the War on Stuff was not, in truth, all that manful: It was a covert mission to slip my college hookah in among the merchandise at the neighbor’s garage sale. (Later I heard him exclaim, “Where the heck did that come from?” and I whispered, “Maybe you’d remember if you hadn’t used it so much.”)  Then I tried flinging excess dog toys over a hedge into a doggy-looking yard down the street (my dog is a hoarder, too). That went well, until I hit a small child in the head. Next I tried selling an old golf putter on eBay, but after seven days eagerly waiting for my little auction to flare up into a bidding war, I came away with $12.33.

Then I discovered a web service called Freecycle, and my life was transformed. Like eBay or Craigslist, Freecycle is a virtual marketplace for anything you want to get rid of, but all merchandise is free. This four-letter word seems to unleash an acquisitive madness in people who otherwise regard garage sale goods with delicately wrinkled noses. Suddenly strangers were hot-stepping up the driveway to haul away bags of orphaned electrical adapters, a half bag of kitty litter my cats had disdained and the mounted head of a deer (somewhat mangy).

At first, I experienced twinges of donor’s remorse, not because I wanted my stuff back, but because I felt guilty about having suckered some poor souls into taking it. But others clearly had no such qualms. One day my regular Freecycle e-mail came in touting an offer of pachysandra plants, “all you can dig.” Another day it was “Chicken innards & freezer-burnt meat.” And both offers found takers.

I soon came to accept that there is a home for every object.  Well, maybe not for the construction paper Thanksgiving turkey I glued together in fourth grade, with the head on backward.

I’m adding that to a new barrel of family heirlooms that I will give my children when they buy their first homes.

A Race of Docile Copiers

The British biologist Mark Paget has an interesting article about how the evolution of ideas parallels the evolution of biological traits.   Though we like to think of Homo sapiens (and ourselves)  as extraordinarily creative, the truth is that real innovation is rare.   Most of us are just spectacularly good at copying and spreading what seem to be the best new ideas.  We are champions only at social learning.

The money paragraphs suggest that social networking via the Internet tends to make copying even more pervasive, and innovation still more rare:

Putting these two things together has lots of implications for where we’re going as societies. As I say, as our societies get bigger, and rely more and more on the Internet, fewer and fewer of us have to be very good at these creative and imaginative processes. And so, humanity might be moving towards becoming more docile, more oriented towards following, copying others, prone to fads, prone to going down blind alleys, because part of our evolutionary history that we could have never anticipated was leading us towards making use of the small number of other innovations that people come up with, rather than having to produce them ourselves.

The interesting thing with Facebook is that, with 500 to 800 million of us connected around the world, it sort of devalues information and devalues knowledge. And this isn’t the comment of some reactionary who doesn’t like Facebook, but it’s rather the comment of someone who realizes that knowledge and new ideas are extraordinarily hard to come by. And as we’re more and more connected to each other, there’s more and more to copy. We realize the value in copying, and so that’s what we do.

And we seek out that information in cheaper and cheaper ways. We go up on Google, we go up on Facebook, see who’s doing what to whom. We go up on Google and find out the answers to things. And what that’s telling us is that knowledge and new ideas are cheap. And it’s playing into a set of predispositions that we have been selected to have anyway, to be copiers and to be followers. But at no time in history has it been easier to do that than now. And Facebook is encouraging that.

And then, as corporations grow … and we can see corporations as sort of microcosms of societies … as corporations grow and acquire the ability to acquire other corporations, a similar thing is happening, is that, rather than corporations wanting to spend the time and the energy to create new ideas, they want to simply acquire other companies, so that they can have their new ideas. And that just tells us again how precious these ideas are, and the lengths to which people will go to acquire those ideas.

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

You can read Paget’s full article here.  But I am wondering if I should suggest that you copy this link to Facebook?  Maybe come up with your own contrarian perspective instead, and demonstrate that innovation lives.

Why Babies Still Take Daddy’s Surname

Why do kids still typically get their Dad’s surname, 50 years after the rise of feminism?  Today’s New York Times offers an explanation that hadn’t occurred to me:

Traditional practices grew out of a male-dominated culture and a need for simple rules. But there is another, less obvious motive: to hold men accountable for their offspring.

“How do you attach men to children?” said Laurie K. Scheuble, a senior lecturer at Pennsylvania State University who has done several studies on naming practices. Names are “a very functional and practical way” to do so.

The article goes on to suggest that “perhaps, in an age when men wear BabyBjorns, it is no longer always necessary.”  But despite our delusions of modernity, the writer inadvertently reveals that  even college professors apparently still rely on another ancient means of keeping restless and paternity-insecure  males attached to family:  Jocular talk about how much the kiddies look like them..

When Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, 32, an English professor who lives in Portland, Ore., married Laura Rosenbaum, he toyed with the idea of a creative synthesis.

But “Rosenpollackpelznerbaum sounded like a weapon of mass destruction,” he said. When they had a son,

Apes in Elevators

I’m at a hotel in Chicago today, riding the elevator with my eyes fixed on the floor.  Primatologist Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago invited me to visit yesterday for a talk about my book The Species Seekers.  Dario has a new book of his own coming out next year, Games Primates Play (Basic Books), and his first chapter offers a very nice explanation of our odd behavior in elevators:

In horror movies, more people are probably murdered in elevators than in any other closed space, including the shower. In real life, the probability of being the victim of a deadly attack in an elevator is virtually zero. Yet, the way people act towards others when they ride together in an elevator suggests that they have serious concerns about their own safety.

If the elevator is crowded, everybody stands still and stares at the ceiling, the floor or the button panel as if they’ve never seen it before. If two strangers ride together in the elevator, they stand as far as possible from each other, don’t face each other directly, don’t make eye contact and don’t make any sudden movements or noises.

Much of people’s behavior in elevators is not the result of rational thinking. It’s an automatic, instinctive response to the situation. The threat of aggression is not real, yet our mind responds as if it is, and produces behaviors meant to protect ourselves.

Elevators are relatively recent inventions, but the social challenges they pose are nothing new. Close proximity to other people in restricted spaces is a situation that has occurred millions of times in the history of humankind.

Imagine two Paleolithic cavemen who follow the tracks of a large bear into the same small, dark cave. There is no bear in there, only the other hungry caveman ominously waving his club: clearly an awkward situation that requires an exit strategy. In those Paleolithic days, murder was an acceptable way to get out of socially awkward situations, much in the way we use an early morning doctor’s appointment as an excuse to leave a dinner party early. In the cave, one of the cavemen whacks the other over the head with his club and the party is over.

Similarly, when male chimpanzees in Uganda encounter a male from another group, they slash his throat and rip his testicles off — just in case

The Sociopathological Architect

Ponti's Prison

I don’t normally write about architecture here because it seems off-topic.  But buildings certainly change our behavior, and I think about that every time I go near one.

So this morning I went looking for the Denver Art Museum and instead found what I took to be a prison, the museum’s North Building, opened in 1971.  The woman at the desk inside explained that Italian architect Gio Ponti had intended it to look like a castle, complete with slit windows, because he thought art needed to be locked up and safeguarded.  ”If a museum has to protect works of art,” he pronounced, “isn’t it only right that it should be a castle?”  The original design actually included a moat.  Ponti’s main entrance, now closed off, is a cylinder that feels like an airlock between alien worlds, art within, drooling masses outside.

Once you manage to find your way in, oddly, the interior is incredibly homey, with warm colors on the walls, and easy chairs arranged in little groupings for people to sit and chat, or just contemplate the art before them.  I have rarely felt more comfortable in a museum.

Libeskind's shipwreck

So then I wandered over to the museum’s new addition, named after some benefactor and designed by Daniel Libeskind.  If Ponti thought it was his job to shut out the city, Libeskind seems to think his job is to make war on it.  His building is a jumble of jagged edges, threatening everything around it. Instead of inviting you to come in, it roars at you to keep your distance:  Don’t touch me.  It’s also covered in highly reflective metal, so you can barely even look at it by day.    Inside, function is similarly distorted by form.  The walls and ceilings everywhere skew toward you or away from you, making it hard to figure out where you are in the building, and where you should be going next.  I found it extremely difficult to just stand still and look at the art, because even standing still, I felt motion sickness coming on.  Libeskind clearly wants us to know that he is an artist, indeed, the artist, above all others, not merely someone who sets the scene.

God save us from such architects.

What Would Don Draper Do?

NPR interviewed me early this week about nation branding ups-and-downs.  What would Don Draper do for Latvia?  Why Kazakhstan needed nation-branding after Borat.

You can go directly to the audio here.

Strike Up The Brand

Illustration by Eric Palma

How often does a national magazine phone  up and invite you to make fun of Swedes, Latvians, Koreans, the Irish, and just about everybody else in the world?  Here’s the result, a story about nation branding for the back page of September’s Smithsonian?  (Slightly edited here to restore a few things lost for space reasons in print):

You know the sense of decorum and probity that marketing consultants have brought to our political campaigns? Now they’re doing the same thing for whole countries. It’s called “nation branding,” a new, improved way to jostle for attention in the global marketplace. A key part of the mission is to sum up a nation in a single dazzling phrase. “Malaysia, Truly Asia,” for instance, or “Chile, All Ways Surprising.” South Korea briefly touted itself as “Dynamic Korea,” and then switched to “Korea, Sparkling,” until someone pointed out that it sounded like a fizzy drink. “Miraculous Korea” was briefly contemplated as a replacement, but finally everyone settled on “Korea, Be Inspired.” (“Korea, So Good We Made Two” was never a serious contender.)

Branding a nation clearly poses many challenges. The tendency of some countries to have a lunatic for dear leader is not, however, one of them; consultants are used to that from the corporate world. But a lot of countries don’t have much of an identity, as far as the outside world is concerned. They proliferate like brands of soap, with only so much sparkle to go around.

You have to sympathize with the authors of an academic article headlined “Development of a national branding strategy: The case of Latvia.” But let’s brainstorm here. The official Latvia travel webpage boasts that “In Latvia, there is every opportunity to receive high-level medical services.” (And, OK, six Unesco World Heritage sites in an area smaller than South Carolina.) But if the idea is to dazzle tourists, investors, international agencies and the media, “Mad Men’s” Don Draper would tell us to reach into their souls: