Two Minds Blog

My students often propose studies with the following type of rationale: People who sleep poorly often feel depressed, and depressed people don’t sleep well, and when people aren’t sleeping well they have a number of other problems like pain, and difficulty exercising, and gaining weight. Therefore, I want to study the complex relationships between sleep, mood, pain, exercise, and weight gain.  The problem with this kind of question is that it doesn't propose any kind of causal path between one concept and another, leading to a lot of chicken-and-egg problems. The concepts may indeed be related, but the theoretical model that the researcher wants to test with his or her study is an undifferentiated mess. A research question that says "are there complex inter-relationships between A, B, and C?" can almost always be answered simply with "yes." In life, almost everything is related to everything else, and human behavior in particular is the product of many weak forc...

There's a 1999 article titled " converting the unconverted " by psychologist Punam Keller, which demonstrates that health behavior change strategies based on fear don't work. For instance, someone with high blood pressure who is told about the risk of heart disease is actually less  likely to take their medication the more strongly the potential health risks of untreated hypertension are emphasized. This is because fear creates cognitive dissonance , which naturally motivates people to resolve the perceived conflict between facts and behavior. The easiest way to do that is often to mentally discount the facts . The more a new fact provokes fear, the stronger the motivation someone will have to ignore it. An example of bad public health policy based on fear involves putting horrible pictures on cigarette packs . This strategy is used in many countries around the world, and involves photos of diseased lungs, blackened teeth, tracheotomy tubes, etc. to emphasize the heal...

No, not that kind of zombie. I want to talk about a kind that behaves like a normal human being, but isn't: something that has been called a "philosopher's zombie." You could also think of this kind of zombie as a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI), one that's capable of passing the Turing test . It is a being that fools us into thinking that it is conscious based on its behavior, but that has no real conscious awareness. It is a very good mimic of behavior, to the point where it can even make verbalizations that seem to describe inner experience: Statements such as "I don't feel like a zombie." I described philosophers' "zombie problem" once before, in a post about  free will , but it's actually more encompassing than whether we control our actions. A true philosopher's zombie not only has no control over its behavior , it also has no internal experiences  of its world. It looks, acts, and talks like we expect fr...

My 11-year-old asked, “have you ever been in a dream where you realized you were dreaming?” She said this had happened to her several times. That experience — lucid dreaming — is a cross-cultural phenomenon that more than half of people experience at some point in their lives, with nearly a quarter of people saying that it happens to them once a month or more. Researchers have found few factors, in terms of either demographics or personality, that predict who is likely to have lucid dreams. To cultivate lucid dreams, people have developed various techniques that can be used to determine whether you are currently dreaming. My older daughter said she had heard you could test whether you were dreaming by counting your fingers, because people in dreams have only eight fingers. This was news to me, but is in fact a known strategy for generating self-awareness during dreaming. The specificity of having eight fingers isn’t essential — instead, lucid dreaming practitioners look for some type...

Psychologist Robert Cialdini recently revised his classic book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion , originally published in 1984. This is one of those interesting cases from the history of psychology where the method of finding things out was just as interesting as the findings. To learn how people influence one another, Cialdini took on an assumed name and signed up for some new jobs. He took training programs designed for used-car dealers, real estate agents, waiters, door-to-door salesmen, and high-end clothing retailers. In each of them, he quizzed his instructors on how to sell things more effectively and took notes on their best tricks for manipulating people's minds and their pocketbooks. From those lessons he distilled six basic principles for changing people's behavior (with a seventh added in the new edition), all of which fundamentally rely on the Intuitive mind. In other words, Cialdini was most interested in the things that people do to guide someone into a p...

In the words of a Danish proverb (often attributed to Yogi Berra), "it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future." I felt that way about a blog post that I wrote last year where I argued that COVID-19 infections were coming in waves that corresponded to people's loosening and tightening of public health precautions. By the end of the year my assessment seemed tragically short-sighted, as COVID-19 infections in Colorado surged to a pinnacle that made all previous peaks and valleys look like nothing more than chance variations.  OK, I thought, I was probably wrong: the behavioral battle against SARS-CoV-2 was lost, and only vaccines would be able to bring us back from the precipice. By March or April of this year that's still how things looked, and numbers were finally on the decline. But in May another surge showed up, and by August the Delta variant had fueled another. Here is Colorado's graph: The new cycle, after vaccinations blunted the very...

What makes some people successful in life and others not? The classical answer to this question is that those who succeed must be the "right sort of person," possessing the quality of excellence (Greek arete ). Aristotle suggested that this excellence could be developed through deliberate practice, while  Plato  proposed that it was inborn. In modern behavioral science, people often propose that excellence is tied to certain behavioral tendencies like self-control or executive functioning, which are in turn supposed to be tied to one's genetic characteristics. This is not too different from Plato: Some people are just born to be more excellent than others. The ancient philosophers had a blind spot when it came to the role of life circumstances or opportunities in producing excellence -- the word  arete , in fact, comes from the same root as the word  aristocrat , with the implication that the rulers of society also had excellent character. The idea that excellence ...