Nathan Taylor

Since the industrial revolution, and the general outbreak of the scientific method, humanity has dramatically improved our collective understanding of the world around us.

One important area where there has been a lot of research is in how we most effectively learn. An interesting meta study was conducted by the Association for Psychological Science, and Kent State University professor John Dunlosky, into the evidence behind how we learn and what strategies are the most effective.

As a compulsive underliner, and sometime note taker, it is enlightening to learn that there are other strategies for studying that are more effective. In fact, Annie Murphy Paul described the effectiveness of these techniques as among the worst. Saying:

Highlighting and underlining led the authors’ list of ineffective learning strategies…studies show they offer no benefit beyond simply reading the text. Some research even indicates that highlighting can get in the way of learning.

The best strategies? Spread study sessions over time and undertake practice testing. They represent the most productive strategies for learning information and helping make sure you remember it.

While our species is almost 200,000 years old, in many regards we are still adolescence coming to understand ourselves and our world for the first time in a meaningful way. I suspect that people will look back on us, and the way we conduct our affairs, in a similar fashion to the way we (or I at least) view people from medieval Europe.

This blog takes a closer look at the marriage/civil partnership survival statistics from the UK and speculate on reasons for the discrepancy between hetero and homo relationships.

The chart below details the number of divorces or dissolutions for heteros and homos. As you can see, while opposites may attract, the statistics suggest they can also repel.

The difference between civil union dissolution and divorce is approximately the same for every year. But it is important to note that this analysis is limited because only four years of civil partnership dissolution data are available.

While the report Civil Partnerships Five Years On does not speculate as to why there might be a discrepancy between the two it does raise some differences between the two types of relationships. These include:

• The age of people forming civil partnerships was older than marriages; and
• Higher number of people forming civil partnerships were ‘single’ ie had never been in a civil partnership or marriage before.

Being older when forming a relationship may be a significant advantage for its longevity as the partners have got their life in order as it were. Or it could be that the fact that the civil partnerships were only available from December 2005 meant that many people who had been in long term relationships took advantage of being able to get them recognised.

The notion that more people in civil partnerships were ‘single’ is an artefact of the system. No doubt many of those people had been in serious relationships in the past, it was just the legal system did not recognise them.

The most charitable (for heterosexuals) interpretation of the data is that there was a large cohort of gays who had been together for a long time and leapt at the chance to have it formally recognised. The long period of legal non-recognition had already weeded out those who wouldn’t make it.

Personally, I believe that the main reason gays and lesbians tend not to break up at the same rate as the heterosexual population is that it has simply taken more effort to form the relationship in the first place. So Britney Spears would never have made it down the aisle to any of her various husbands had she been a lesbian. What the statistics are showing are the relationship survival of people who have been through a winnowing as it were. It may be that in time, as more gays and lesbians marry early in their relationship things will even out. Time will tell.

It is interesting that more women than men dissolve their same-sex civil partnership in the UK. While lesbians constituted only 45 per cent of all civil unions formed from 2005 to 2010, they were 62 per cent of all dissolutions. In contrast, gay men dissolved their civil relationships at a rate of only 1.6 per cent. This is apparently consistent with other countries with same-sex partnership laws, such as Norway and Sweden.

There could be many reasons for this, from lesbians having a higher divorce rate than men entering civil partnerships or from them having more children in their relationships (a key source of stress). An alternative point, put forward by Andrew Sullivan, is that women tend to file for divorce more frequently than men do. This is a finding consistent across time and across cultures. Maybe, despite all social assumptions to the contrary, men make more stable partnerships?

Human’s learn best from each other. One of the most distinguishing features is how much of our time we spend teaching each other. Unlike most other animals, humans are born with little understanding of the world and few instincts to guide us. This is our great strength. We are born with far less of a destiny than, say, salmon forced to return to their ancestral spawning grounds even though the effort kills them.

But it is also a weakness of our species. Take for example agriculture. This enabled the development of human civilisations, as people were no longer constrained by the energy available from the sun at any point in time. They could store a portion of the annual energy for future consumption, rather than having to rely on what fruits were in season or what game was wandering around.

The agricultural revolution occurred 95 per cent of the way into the total amount of time our species has spent on this small green planet. Thus far.

That means for 95 per cent of humanities history we didn’t even have the rudimentary basis for civilisation! I find it incredible!

What is particularly interesting is how the Neolithic Revolution only took place in a number of places. To be specific, archaeological data indicates that various forms of plants and animal domestication evolved independently in six separate locations worldwide circa 10,000–7000 years ago.

So, the BIGGEST invention in human history only occurred six times. That is to say, the rest of humanity, for the majority of our frail species existence, did not even have the fundamental basis of civilisation.

Despite it being ‘invented’ in only a few places. The innovations spread through copy cats.

What is interesting to me is how the internet has fundamentally transformed the human capacity to learn from each other. Now our social domain is not restricted to just the cousins and close relatives you might be wandering the African savannah with, but the entirety of the human race. Or at least those of the seven billion of us that are wired to the net.

How exciting!

For the most perfect expression of the creative potential of our species, I present to you:

INTERNET MEME!

These are fascinating expressions of collective creativity as people take a shared expression/situation or image and add a little wrinkle to the idea.

Some examples of these memes include: Rick Rolling or Ridiculously Photogenic Guy.

At heart, internet memes are shared creative endeavours. Pouring scorn/humour or attention on the irrelevancies of life.

I have developed my own, very first ever, contribution to this process via adopting the “Call me maybe” internet meme. Newsweek describes this as:

The chorus to Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen’s hit song “Call Me Maybe” goes like this: “Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my number, so call me, maybe?” Those catchy lyrics, which have propelled the poppy song to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100, spawned a variety of playful images referencing various moments in history and pop culture. As it pops up everywhere from Billboard to photos across the Internet to business cards in bars, “Call Me Maybe” is crowned our Meme of the Week.

My contribution to humanities collective creativity is:

While there is every reason to suspect that this expression of a momentary meme will not achieve world wide web immortality, it was fun being involved! At the end of the day is that not a perfect summary of what humanity is about?

Successful people are those that find what they love to do it and then pursue that thing relentlessly. Once discovered, they will ensure they spend as much time doing that one thing and creating it into an art form. They experience increasing marginal utility when acting in their passion.

I love meeting such people. This week I had the good fortune to share breakfast with one such person. She was an Associate Professor, head Accounting Economics Finance at Melbourne based university.

Being curious as to why someone would become an academic in accountancy, I asked her why she’d pursued that career. Her response was that she loved to teach, her earliest memories were about teaching. “Even as a young child, I would sit all the cats on chairs and teach them about the world. I think I spent my childhood trying to get them to sit still. It was good preparation for dealing with academics!”

What was particularly impressive was how professional success flowed from personal passion. Interestingly, IQ is not a very good performance of job performance according to the Handbook of Intelligence by Richard K Wagner of Florida State University. Surveys of research on IQ and job performance conclude that: “ IQ predicts only about four per cent of variance in job performance.”

According to the authors John D Mayer, Peter Salovey, and David Caruso, IQ contributes only about 20 per cent to life success.

The biggest factor is clarity about your passions. As the good book says, “A man’s gift takes him before Kings.”

Consciousness imbues the mundane with the miraculous. Take rock and roll wrestling.

I was struck today, while watching rock and roll wrestling, that one of the boons of consciousness is the capacity to impart depth and meaning to activities that are intrinsically meaningless. The principle way we do this is through the stories we tell ourselves about the world around us.

Narrative is one critical form of human thinking failure (link to past post). But is also a source of meaning in life.

In the book, Flow: the psychology of optimal experience, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describes a series of studies in which people experience extreme hardship and transform their lives rather than have them crushed and destroyed by the experience.

The examples of people with extreme handicaps were collected by Professor Fausto Massimini of the psychology department of the University of Milan. One study found that paraplegics, generally young people who lost the use of their limbs as a result of an accident, described the experience as both the most negative and most positive experience of their life. For instance:

Lucio, one of the members of this group, was a twenty-year-old happy-go-lucky gas station attendant when a motorcycle accident paralysed him below the waist. He had previously liked playing rugby and listening to music, but basically he remembers his life as purposeless and uneventful…Upon recovery from the tragedy he enrolled in college, graduated in languages, and now works as a freelance tax consultant. Both study and work are intense sources of flow; so are fishing and shooting with a bow and arrow. He is currently a regional archery champion – competing from a wheelchair.

(This example is cited from Flow, page 194). In the same pages, Csikszentmihalyi describes how people can transform negative events :

The integrity of the self depends on the ability to take neutral or destructive events and turn them into positive ones. Getting fired could be a godsend, if one took the opportunity to find something else to do that was more in tune with one’s desires.

It is not the event, but the interpretation of the event that determines whether it is good or bad. The story we tell ourselves.

Now, back to rock and roll wrestling.

Wrestlemania (and I am sure you already know) has been described by its supporters as the grandest stage on earth. When I watched it for the first time today, I was struck by how vivid the characters are, how extreme they are, and how they create tension and excitement in what is so clearly a staged event. Awesome.

I dug around the inter-webs and found this write up that highlights the narrative tension of the spectacle. Melanie, the Editor in Chief of this site, wrote the following describing a regular week in Wrestlemania:

With all of the Divas now in the ring, it’s time to get this bad boy started as former BFFs, Eve and Kelly face off first. The two Divas lock up as Eve takes early control, backing K2 into the ropes and kneeing her in the midsection. Eve whips Kelly into the ropes but Kelly slides through her legs and manages to flip Eve onto her back using her arms. Nice move! Kelly follows up with a hurricanrana and a pin attempt but Eve kicks out.

Eve comes back firing with shots to Kelly and whips her into the corner as the crowd chants “Hoeski”. Eve misses a clothesline in the corner and Kelly takes advantage, smashing Eve’s head into the turnbuckle several times. Kelly riles up the crowd now for her patented handspring elbow but Eve wisely holds up her knees, driving them into K2′s back. Eve goes up top for a moonsault but Kelly manages to get to her feet and cuts Eve off, knocking her down to the mat. Kelly tags in Maria and the pair hit a double stinkface on Eve. Maria then realises why she shouldn’t have worn white, as Eve’s make-up leaves a questionable stain on the butt area of her pants.

As the referee restores order by seeing Kelly back to her corner, Beth hits Maria with a cheap shot, kicking her in her injured ribs. Eve has the advantage now, laying into an injured Maria. As Eve distracts the referee, Beth again hits a cheap shot on Maria. Eve then applies a nice body-scissors, applying pressure to Maria’s injured ribs. The crowd, however, is still not happy about the way the opening contest ended, chanting, “Daniel Bryan” and “YES! YES! YES!”

The review continues in a similar vein for quite a while. A couple of things to note:

1. There is such a thing as a moonsault, stinkface, and a ‘booty pop standing moonsault.’
2. There are referees involved in this. Although it appears they only have a limited level of involvement.
3. This was a pay per view event. Presumably people actually paid to view the event. It really does take all sorts.

Without the capacity to transform the menial into the sublime, humans would be little more than earthworms. Creatures with no purpose but to transform the fruits of the earth through our beings and return them, little changed. Taking the dross that is our life and making meaning from it may be no more than a mental affection, but it makes all the difference in the world.

Creating a meaningful narrative of your life is a sign of good mental health. Having said that, believing the narrative of rock and roll wrestling might negate that!

In the Greek myth, Ulysses wanted to hear the Sirens’ song although he knew that doing so would render him incapable of rational thought. The sirens were seductress women who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island.

To avoid the insanity that accompanied listening to the music, Ulysses insisted that his men put wax in their ears so that they could not hear the song. He then had them tie him to the mast so that he could not jump into the sea. He ordered them not to change course under any circumstances, and to keep their swords upon him to attack him if he should break free of his bonds. When he heard the sound of the sirens, Ulysses tried with all his might to escape his bonds, but rationality returned when they left the vicinity of the island.

Behavioural economics guru Dan Ariely, uses the story of Ulysses and the sirens as an example of understanding the limits of personal self control and our human ability to override these limits. He says:

It seems that [Ulysses'...] ability to exert self-control is less connected to a natural ability to be more zen-like in the face of temptations, and more linked to the ability to reconfigure our environment (tying ourselves to the mast) and modulate the intensity by which it tempts us (filling our ears with wax).

This is an excellent point. It is only in appreciating our physical limitations can we take the action to supersede or override those limitations. I think this is where behavioural economics can play an important role in the public policy debate. It is not about focusing on human frailty and exposing our collective stupidity just for its own sake. (Simply watch an episode of any form or reality TV to do that.) Instead, it is to understand our physical limitations so that we can construct public and private policy/institutional frameworks to overcome them.

The capacity to develop solutions and responses to our physical constraints is what defines out humanity. I wonder where it will lead?

How you assess your responsibility and control over a situation has a major impact on how well you will end up performing. Assessing how you ‘grant responsibility’ (the basis of attribution theory) for success has been found to differentiate the successful from the unsuccessful in a number of fields.

Roesch and Amirkham (1997) examined newspaper reports on sportspeople and how they attributed their wins and losses. They found that more experienced athletes made less self serving external attributions (like, “I lost because I was not feeling well”). Professional athletes were more capable of making the right connections so that they could find the real cause of their failures – and then taking personal responsibility to improve their performance.

In the book, No Excuses: Be the hero of your own life, the author Eric Lucas describes has experience as a boxer. His experience was described as:

“Lucas lost several bouts to tough opponents during the early part of his career, but was quick to attribute each loss to lack of experience. This was a factor that was clearly subject to change and could be improved by personal commitment. These losses were lessons since Lucas took personal responsibility for his losses, gained more experience, and in 2001 became WBC Super Middleweight World Boxing Champion.”  

If you are ever going to improve your results, you need to take personal responsibility for it!

On this basis, a 1998 study found that it is far more motivating to give a pep talk than a tirade focused on criticising poor performance. The reason is that a tirade is focused on finding fault and criticising athletes. This is demoralising for their egos and reduces their subsequent performance. A ‘pep’ talk, which focuses on how to improve areas of failure, and of convincing the athletes that they can improve, was more successful.

The study involved University of Florida Professor Robert Singer, and colleague Iris Orbach, dividing 35 college age beginning tennis players into three groups. Each group was given different instructions regarding their personal failure. The first was told that they were in control of their situation and could, through effort, improve it. The second was told their failures were due to a lack of innate ability. The third group was told nothing.

Over the course of four trials of the experiment, the first group consistently scored higher levels of performance, while having better expectations, more accurate assessments of their success and greater levels of emotional control. On a test to measure the feelings of personal control over their behaviour, the first group scored twice as high as the control group while the second (those who received discouraging assessments) scored below the control group.

In a similar study (in 1997) which focused on basketball time trials, the first group improved their final time between the first and fourth trials more than twice as much as the control group. This is a good result. It is staggering when compared with the group who received negative reinforcement. This first group performed more than nine times as much as the second group did.

Attribution theory provides important insights into the success of students. Psychologist Bernard Weiner expressed attribution theory in terms of students and theorized students would attribute their successes or failures in terms of three dimensions mentioned here.  

For a student to be successful, they should view themselves as having internal responsibility for their results, and locate control over obtaining those results as being within their personal capability, then they are more likely to expend personal effort to achieve results.

If, on the other hand, they perceive ‘success’ as being outside of their control, because they either lack the skills or results are determined by ‘luck,’ then they are very unlikely to expend much effort. So their results will be poor!

The ideal type of ‘attribution’ about academic success that an individual can make will involve them having:

• A sincere belief that they are competent and that occasional failures are because of bad luck or not enough effort.
• But they must attribute success to both ability and effort. If they think they think their sufficiently talented, then they might stop working at it. The ideal attribution for success is, “I succeeded because I am a competent person and worked hard.”
• When they fail, they are most likely to persist and eventually succeed if they attribute their failure to a lack of appropriate effort.
• Finally, effort itself is worth thinking about. It needs to be effective effort. If your just banging your head against a wall you may employ a lot of effort. But, it might be far more effective to move two feet to the right and open the door!

I am living proof of what can happen when you change how you ‘attribute’ responsibility and capability.

I remember the first time I ever seriously studied. During grade 12 at school I distinctly remember opening my chemistry text book. I’d owned it for almost two years but had never opened it until that day.

I had made a conscious decision to study as hard as I could that year. I’d decided to try anything with the intent to improve. This decision was invaluable! When I got results back from teachers I would ask them, “What could I have done to improve? What separated my work from being 100 percent?”

I kept improving my work until, eventually I would get the top results in my class. That didn’t stop me pestering the teachers! I kept at it and ended up coming top at my school.

While I’ve had more significant achievements in my life, I remember that one so distinctly because it was the first time I located control within myself. I attributed success or failure as being within my personal control.

As a young man Benjamin Franklin described 13 virtues that he wanted to cultivate. He then devoted the rest of his life to building them into himself. Franklin confessed to not live completely by his virtues, he believed the attempt made him a better man and contributed to his success and happiness. This is why, in his autobiography, he devoted more pages to this plan than to any other single point.

The results of Fanklin’s plan are astonishing. Reading the lists of achievements of this great man is to be amazed. He was a colossus of a figure.

Benjamin Franklin attributed his personal character to being within his control and something over which he could exercise volitional effort.   This belief gave him the motivation to do something about his personal behaviour and characteristic when so many of us (I’m looking at myself here) believe our negative characteristics are outside our control.  

Attribution theory describes how humans process events and circumstances and its influence over their behaviour. It postulates that people look for explanations of behaviour, theirs or that of someone else, by “looking for explanations of behaviour, associating either dispositional (internal) attributes or situational (external) attributes.”

Attribution literally means the ‘granting of responsibility. The mental interpretation people draw about their control over circumstances and situations has a profound implication for their motivation and behaviour.

The initial idea was expressed as:

“Men behave as amateur scientists in social situations. He also said that, we generally explain behavior in two ways; either we attribute the behavior to a person or a situation.”

This was put forward in the book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, by Fritz Heider in 1958. According to Heider, attribution takes a three step process. These steps involve a person:

(1)    Perceiving an action;

(2)    Judging the intent of the action; and

(3)    Attribution a disposition (either internal or external) to the action.

However, it was another psychologist, Bernard Weiner, who created the framework that is most often used. Expressing attribution theory in terms of students, Weiner theorized students would attribute their successes or failures in terms of three dimensions:

• locus (location of the cause internal or external to the person);
• stability (whether the cause stays the same or can change); and
• responsibility (whether the person can control the cause).

The basic principle of attribution theory as it applies to motivation is that a person’s own perceptions or attributions for success or failure determine the amount of effort the person will expend on that activity in the future.

Benjamin Franklin viewed his personal character to be within his control and to be stable. He then decided that the responsibility for developing his character was his personal responsibility (not his parents, not Gods, not societies).

How many people do that? Isn’t the common belief that who we are, as a person, is something that happens to us and is outside of our control? I know I’ve believed it!

Well, the Christmas and New Year holiday season is finally over. I hope you enjoyed the gift giving. This time of year always reminds me of how much we as a society have in our life. It is often a struggle to find something to give to loved ones because we have such incredible material wealth. (It is a Christmas application of the Webber’s Law.)

To give you some perspective, take the case of Polish railway worker, Jan Grzebski, who was hit by a train in 1988 and fell into a coma. He woke 19 years later to find his world completely changed. The communist party was no longer in power and food was not rationed. He said, “Now I see people on the streets with mobile phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin.”

Mr Grzebski observed that his biggest surprise was how much his countrymen complained. They had everything he’d dreamed of before his coma, but they didn’t even notice it.

Australia is such a rich place to live, our natural environment gives us so much to be grateful for, as does the society we live in. It would be a shame if the only time we were grateful for this was at Christmas when it can be a source of irritation!

Happiness research suggests that taking a few minutes a day to think about some of the things we have to be grateful for will improve your overall attitude. Building a daily ritual of gratefulness is a sure-fire way to improve your overall happiness.