A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Last week New Scientist had an article on How Novels Help Drive Social Evolution. The article reports on a study by Jonathan Gottschall and co-author Joseph Carroll at the University of Missouri, St Louis, about how “Darwin’s theories of evolution apply to literature” (I’m not putting in a link to the study since you have to pay to view it). Gottschall and Carroll with John Johnson, an evolutionary psychologist at Pennsylvania State University in DuBois, asked 500 people to fill in a questionnaire about 200 classic Victorian novels. The believe:

Boehm and Carroll believe novels have the same effect as the cautionary tales told in older societies. “Just as hunter-gatherers talk of cheating and bullying as a way of staying keyed to the goal that the bad guys must not win, novels key us to the same issues,” says Boehm. “They have a function that continues to contribute to the quality and structure of group life.”

“Maybe storytelling – from TV to folk tales – actually serves some specific evolutionary function,” says Gottschall. “They’re not just by-products of evolutionary adaptation.”

This reminded me that back in March of 2006, I’d reviewed A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong. The premise was that people need stories or myths as much as they needed food and water (my words not hers). Basically, people have always told stories. We gathered round the fire and told of hunts, of battles, of the gods, of how good got rewarded and bad was punished. If you haven’t read this work, you really should.  It doesn’t retell the fairy stories or legends, it helps to place them in perspective according to their appearance along the time line of human social evolution.

In stories we pass on information from the older to the younger generation. Stories allow us to learn from our past and plan for our future. Children play to prepare them for the roles they will take on in life. In early days, they played at the hunt, imitating what they’d heard in the stories from their elders, the hunters of the tribe. They took in these lessons, tips, and warnings and as they grew they internalized these stories and used them in their lives. They observed the life around them and developed stories to make sense of what they saw.

Stories are essential to human culture. From stories we learn how to act. We learn about what is right and wrong and sometimes we learn that what seems right or wrong is actually the opposite. We learn to beware Greeks bearing gifts. Many of the sayings we use daily conversation are based in stories from our past.

We’ve mostly moved from a mostly oral to a mostly written tradition as few people are drawn to the position of Bard or Storyteller. At one time they brought news from one community to another and passed on the accumulated knowledge they’d learned in their travels in the form of  stories. Beyond that, our lives are but stories for the next generations, which I feel Shakespeare touched on when he wrote:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,

While you can still occasionally find storytellers, we mostly read books. The Bards/Storyteller of our time are authors — those whose fiction fulfills our need for stories. From books I learned much of what I know of life in different social classes than the one in which I was born, or life in other cultures, or other planets. I learned the manners and modes of behavior; how to survive outside my comfort zone of what I know. I also learned that these people, no matter which century they lived in, had the same fears, desires, wishes, dreams and hopes that I do. I learned that I was not alone. I learned that others had gone before me and that I could learn from their successes and their mistakes.

Stories are cautionary, informative, educational, and entertaining. Yes, “storytelling – from TV to folk tales – actually serves some specific evolutionary function” and any avid reader could have told these researchers about the importance of stories in our lives. However, it’s nice to have our beliefs ratified by science.

Many times in my life I’ve found myself out of sync with my friends, companions, family members, coworkers, or what have you.  Some times, I just shrug and let it go because it isn’t that important to me.  Other times, I’ll stick to my point — mostly I’ll stand pat if the issue is one that I feel strongly about — usually social or moral issues.  Other times I maintain my opinion but keep it to myself in order to avoid confrontations — I haven’t changed my mind I just don’t advertise my beliefs.

Well it seems from a CNN article Why so many minds think alike that our brains might be wired to bring us into conformity with our social groups.  The study in the journal Neuron, Reinforcement Learning Signal Predicts Social Conformity was performed by Vasily Klucharev, Kaisa Hytönen, Mark Rijpkema, Ale Smidts, and Guillén Fernáandez. (The study itself is not available unless you either have access to Neuron or purchase it.) The study summary says:

We often change our decisions and judgments to conform with normative group behavior. However, the neural mechanisms of social conformity remain unclear. Here we show, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, that conformity is based on mechanisms that comply with principles of reinforcement learning. We found that individual judgments of facial attractiveness are adjusted in line with group opinion. Conflict with group opinion triggered a neuronal response in the rostral cingulate zone and the ventral striatum similar to the prediction error signal suggested by neuroscientific models of reinforcement learning. The amplitude of the conflict-related signal predicted subsequent conforming behavioral adjustments. Furthermore, the individual amplitude of the conflict-related signal in the ventral striatum correlated with differences in conforming behavior across subjects. These findings provide evidence that social group norms evoke conformity via learning mechanisms reflected in the activity of the rostral cingulate zone and ventral striatum.

That phrase “prediction error” is explained by Dr. Klucharev as:

A prediction error, first identified in reinforcement learning models, is a difference between expected and obtained outcomes that is thought to signal the need for a behavioral adjustment.

Back in my psychology courses it was referred to as “cognitive dissonance”:

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it to develop so that we become “open” to them.

Hmmm.  It seems that, as humans, we don’t like to be outside the group comfort zone.  We want the others to like us and, sadly, we’re basically so insecure in our own opinions if they differ too much from those of the group that we’ll change our opinion to match the group.  So, to put it clearly — yes, if everyone else is jumping off a cliff, we’ll probably do it too.  Now parents have the answer to that age old question.

In this study, using magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain activity of their subjects, they could actually see the brain trying to cope with being out of conformity with their study peers in their grading of the attractiveness of people in photos.  When the subject’s judgment was out of line with the group’s they changed their scoring on a subsequent judgment of the same photo.

Summing up:

“The present study explains why we often automatically adjust our opinion in line with the majority opinion,” says Dr. Klucharev. “Our results also show that social conformity is based on mechanisms that comply with reinforcement learning and is reinforced by the neural error-monitoring activity which signals what is probably the most fundamental social mistake—that of being too different from others.”

We just might have a few problems with the way we do things.  For example, our justice system requires that juries be unanimous in their verdict.  What this study says is that even if a minority of people don’t think the majority is correct in their decisions, they’ll change their mind in order to conform with the community of jurors of which they are a part.  They’ll want to fit in.  Maybe we should have a system more along the lines of the Supreme Court where there is a majority and a minority report turned in to the judge.  Sometimes, there really isn’t enough information to make a determination but if the majority goes one way the minority will feel obligated to agree — might explain why some innocent people have been convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.

In my life, I have at times held true to my principles and been sneered at and later in time proved to have been right all along.  Of course, the flip side is that I’ve also been proved to be wrong some of the time also.  However, I’m willing to admit that I was wrong.  I’m also willing to change my mind when more facts show up that give me more data points to make up my mind on an issue. Some people, on the other hand, make up their minds and all the facts in the world can’t make a dent in their belief in their rightness.

However, conformity with the community has survival benefits.  If you fit in with your community they rally around you when you need help, they join together to assist in tasks too big for one person, and they support and protect each other.  Thus changing opinions to match the majority makes sense for survival and thus it seems it’s built in to us.

The problem is that change, growth, and innovation seems to come from those who think outside the box or move to the sound of a different drummer (notice that this week I’m really into these homilies).  So, maybe finding ways to accommodate those who have different views or who see the world differently — who don’t agree with the majority — should not be ostracized just out of hand.  Maybe these nonconformists should be looked at to see if their views are indeed “wrong” or “not like the others” or maybe these ideas/beliefs/judgments are valid in their own right but not necessarily the way we’d have processed that information ourselves.

This study has lots of implications — many of which could help to assist innovation and creativity, others to aid in adding fairness to our judicial and political system.  But more studies need to be done.  For example, I want to know if these same results would be seen when testing a similar group of men (in case you haven’t checked the original articles, the above case was performed solely on women).  Women have culturally been lead to accommodate others, to get along, to fit in and not make waves.  Would a similar study of men have the same finding?  I don’t know and until more studies are done with men and mixed gender groups there can be no plans for developing how to cope with this new information in order to increase the “good” of the community.

I say “Watch the sky!” not in a The Thing or Independence Day kind of way. I’m not expecting an alien invasion any time soon. No, I’m saying it because 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy — with all sorts of events planned throughout the world.

The International Year of Astronomy website has lots of information about what they’re planning for the year. And here’s their general spiel about it:

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 is a global effort initiated by the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery.

High ideals and I don’t know how that can be accomplished but I will try to watch the sky more myself and I hope you will too.

New Years’ Eve, we worked until after midnight getting the zines up. Then, a bit wired, we decided to walk down to the mailbox (1/4 mile away). It was cold and windy so we really bundled up. Woo hoo it was cold. But all bundled up it wasn’t back except for the bits without covering like my eyes and cheeks. Yeah, I grew up in Maine, but I’ve lived in Maryland enough years to make me a cold-weather wimp.

What I remember most, other than the cold, is that after we came out of the trees on our property, our neighbor has trees on one side of the dirt road and big fields and her house on the other side. The sky was pitch black with no clouds at all — might have been wisps but I didn’t notice them. Orion was so bright and sharp you could easily follow his belt stars up to the Seven Sisters. Hyperion picked out constellations for me and I swear with the naked eye you could see the difference between a blue and a red star. Jupiter was so bright that at first I thought it might be the North Star. We stood and just marveled how beautiful the sky was and wasn’t it too bad that the best viewing was so late at night when all the ambient lights of houses, cars, whatever are out. It’s a sight I won’t forget — it’s one of those moments in life that make a memory to be cherished.

So that’s why a saw “Watch the Sky!” Make your own memories of beautiful star-filled skies. Perhaps you might want to wait until it’s a bit warmer — but still — look up in wonder now and then. Find a book and learn one or two of the constellations. Make it a family project. Or just enjoy a quite moment of contemplation.

I read today a short quote from Oscar Wilde:

, “A school should be the most beautiful place in every town and village – so beautiful that the punishments for undutiful children should be that they should be debarred from going to school the following day.”

I checked to see that he’d said it and found the quote listed in “The Schooldays of Oscar Wilde”
by David Robertson, Portora Archivist. It seems Oscar Wilde’s school didn’t live up to his belief that schools should be beautiful.

I went to school in the usual picture book schoolhouse — looking a bit like you’d expect a church to look actually. It was a small school with grades kindergarten through sixth grade. Then it was on to junior high (the first year in that school) and then high school (the last class to graduate from that building).

I was an okay student. Looking back I believe I could have been a much better student but I was more interested in learning in general than in learning just what was taught. If I found something interesting in an assignment, I was likely to go to the library or to our set of encyclopedias and look up more information and read on that topic until my interest got caught by something else. So, homework got a lick and a promise, but luckily in such small school I was still a A-B student.

Then came college. That’s when lots of things changed. You see I thought that college was the time to explore, learn, expand my horizons, and check out new areas of study. It took nearly flunking out to make me realize that that’s not what colleges are for. College is to polish the edges of what you already know and add depth to the knowledge that you already have. Taking a subject you know nothing about and studying like crazy and ending up knowing a lot but not as much as the students who came into it already knowing the basics and building on that knowledge usually left you at the C or D level, and that’s not how you graduate. So, eventually, I learned that college was not for learning and settled down to polish my edges and got a degree. I even did most of the studying for a MS before I decided I just couldn’t take the politics and rules for rules sake that made little to no sense to me.

However, looking at school now and talking to teens and younger children — schools are prisons now. There’s guards and police officers. In some schools students go through metal scanners similar to the ones in airports. Their belongings can be searched at any time. Some schools have won cases in court and banned students or punished them for things they did outside of school hours and off school grounds. With budget cuts and a worsening economy text books are getting older and older and more out of date. The buildings are decaying. Many classes are held in trailers set up next to the schools.

I honestly can’t think of an environment that is less likely to encourage learning. Then you add in the unfunded No Child Left Behind which translates into you will learn to pass the tests because we can’t do anything else with our budget. The bullying that children suffer from, that teachers can and will do nothing about — because Zero Tolerance means the victim is victimized twice, once by the bully and again by getting the same punishment as the bully if it’s reported. Zero Tolerance means that the letter not the spirit of all the rules is followed and that lowers students respect for and belief in fairness, justice, and authority.

Schools now-a-days seem more about not offending anyone anywhere rather than teaching facts, skills, logic, science, and how-to find out about a topic. To me it is a wonder that anyone learns anything in schools now-a-days and from some of the studies that show up showing that most American’s think the Sun goes around the Earth, that can’t name the states of the US (or even half of them), and can’t find countries on a labeled map. [Hyperion: Or my own pet peeve: That still think global warming and/or evolution are hoaxes.]

Our schools need help and we need to encourage learning. Schools are not supposed to be just places where sports occur at regular intervals with pep rallies. Schools are supposed to be where learning occurs. Where students open their minds to learn about new ideas, new thoughts, and new ways of putting those ideas and thoughts together to form hypotheses, and to gain skills to help them find jobs and work that will be satisfying to them.

Schools should be beautiful places of learning, knowledge, and exciting ideas. Punishment should be denying us the ability to attend schools. Of course, right now your economic ability to pay impacts your ability to attend school more than any other factor. Education should rest on ability to learn not ability to pay.

Just some thoughts…