The Questioning Christian

A brief meditation about a civilized prison – NY Times

I’ve long wondered whether imprisonment, especially for long terms in unpleasant conditions, is the most effective ‘industry-standard’ consequence for criminal behavior. In the NY Times Magazine, Jim Lewis writes of a strikingly-‘civilized’ prison in Austria, musing about how American prisons came to be the way they are, and wondering whether “to borrow a phrase from a Conservative British home secretary, [prison] has been ‘an expensive way of making bad people worse.’”

Excerpt:

Does imprisonment work? It seems like a bottom-line question, but the answer depends on what you want prisons to do, and that’s not an easy thing to decide. * * *

…  most crimes are committed either in the heat of the moment or by career criminals who consider themselves invincible. Few people in either group think about where they might wind up.

When I asked one of the prisoners at Leoben if he was surprised by how nice it was, he said no; what surprised him was that he’d been caught in the first place.

In fact, though most of us are reluctant to admit it, we mainly use prisons as storage containers, putting people there with the hope that, if nothing else, five years behind bars means five years during which they can’t commit more crimes.

It’s called warehousing, and we do a lot of it.

[Emphasis in original, extra paragraphing added.]

Read it all.

Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal

Nicholas Kristof writes:

Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.

Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.

Read it all, especially toward the end, concerning possible evolutionary bases for these divergent reactions – and how to compensate for them.

Original sin: Self-interest motivating self-deception

"The theological rationale for the necessity (and the potential nobility) of government can be summarized in two words: original sin. Each and every person and institution is prone to self-deception and destructive self-interest. ... There is no such thing as sufficient self-regulation on Wall Street, on Main Street, in our churches or anywhere else. ...

— Rodney Clapp, "American Soundings," The Christian Century, Nov. 18, 2008, p. 45.

Related posts:

• Sin as Evolutionary Side Effect
• Financial regulations can be like fire safety rules
• Sin = Failure to "Get It"?

Conservatives laugh more than liberals?

From John Tierney's column today in the NY Times:

Indeed, the conservatives did rate the traditional golf and marriage jokes as significantly funnier than the liberals did. But they also gave higher ratings to the absurdist “Deep Thoughts.” In fact, they enjoyed all kinds of humor more.

“I was surprised,” said Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University, who collaborated on the study with Elisabeth Malin, a student at Mount Holyoke College. “Conservatives are supposed to be more rigid and less sophisticated, but they liked even the more complex humor.”

Check it out.

Political differences may lie in different fear responses

From the Boston Globe:

... researchers found a strong correlation between subjects' political attitudes and their physiological responses to threat. People who showed more "blink startle" and perspiration after a threatening stimulus tended to cluster on the right politically. They advocated capital punishment, school prayer, and defense spending, and they supported the Iraq war.

In contrast, liberals - who supported "less protectionist" policies such as gun control, open immigration, and increased foreign aid - showed significantly less physical response to the threatening stimuli. ... And the degree to which a person was startled by threatening stimuli indicated how much he or she advocated policies that protect society from external and internal threats such as wars and crime. [¶ ¶]

When researchers compared subjects' physical responses with their political opinions, they found a striking correlation. "It was clear," Hibbing said, "that some individuals have certain central-nervous-system reactions in the part of the brain involved in fear - there's a genetic basis for this - and this brain activity underlies both their startle response and their political views."

Eve LaPorte, Born to Party, Boston Globe, Nov. 2, 2008 (emphasis added; hat tip: Hacker News).

Nirvana may be a right-brain phenomenon

"JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana. [¶] But she did it by having a stroke."

Read the rest.  [UPDATE: See also the video of her TED talk is here (thanks to commenter 'RedLefty').]

Our brains can deceive us, even about wine

From Eric Asimov, "Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?" NY Times, May 7, 2008:

But assuming for the moment that it’s true that most drinkers prefer the cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it.

The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

Emotion makes reasoned decisions possible

"Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux have shown that emotion isn’t the opposite of reason. We use emotion to assign value to things, thus making decision-making possible."

— David Brooks, How Voters Think, NY Times, Jan. 18, 2008

Study: Conservatives are statistically more prone than liberals to jump to (erroneous) conclusions

What I found interesting about this Los Angeles Times report was the implication that conservatives, because of their brain "wiring," appear to be more likely than liberals, not just to jump to conclusions, but also to jump to erroneous conclusions.

Who knows: Given that a corollary of the First Commandment is to face the facts as best we can, this might have implications for the way we think about The Current Disputes in the Episcopal Church.

Excerpt (emphasis mine):

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions. * * *

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts [between thinking and habit], and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy. * * *

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.
"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Denise Gellene, Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 10, 2007 (emphasis added).

In the proper circumstances, of course, jumping to conclusions can be a very useful thing. There are situations where you don't have time to think through what you're going to do. According to the LA Times article, the study's lead author, NYU assistant professor David Amodio, acknowledged this; "[t]he tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, [Amodio] said."

Still, when it comes to policy decisions that have long-term effects on people's lives, you do sort of hope that the deciders think things through instead of just engaging in knee-jerk reactions.

Religious intolerance may stem from fear of death

Some of us have long suspected that the vitriol that issues from religious radicals might have a significant psychological component. Apparently there's research to support the notion that the psychological component is the fear of one's own death.

The latest issue of The New Republic (Aug. 27) has an intriguing piece, Death Grip, by John B. Judis. He reports on extensive research by experimental psychologists, suggesting pretty clearly that:

... the mere thought of one's mortality can trigger a range of emotions--from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores.

Judis writes:

To test the hypothesis that recognition of mortality evokes "worldview defense"--their term for the range of emotions, from intolerance to religiosity to a preference for law and order, that they believe thoughts of death can trigger--they assembled 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but, for one group, they inserted in the middle of the personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke awareness of their mortality.

One [exercise] asked the judges to "briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you"; the other required them to "jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you physically as you die and once you are physically dead."

They then asked the judges to set bail in the hypothetical case of a prostitute whom the prosecutor claimed was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises set an average bail of $455. The control group that did not do the exercises set it at an average of $50. The psychologists knew they were onto something.

Over the next decade, the three performed similar experiments to illustrate how awareness of death could provoke worldview defense. They showed that what they now called "mortality salience" affected people's view of other races, religions, and nations.

When they had students at a Christian college evaluate essays by what they were told were a Christian and a Jewish author, the group that did the mortality exercises expressed a far more negative view of the essay by the Jewish author than the control group did. (German psychologists would find a similar reaction among German subjects toward Turks.)

They also conducted numerous experiments to show that mortality exercises evoked patriotic responses. The subjects who did the exercises took a far more negative view of an essay critical of the United States than the control group did and also expressed greater veneration for cultural icons like the flag.

The three even devised an experiment to show that, after doing the mortality exercises, conservatives took a much harsher view of liberals, and vice versa.

In conducting these experiments, they took care not to tell the subjects what they were doing. They also devised experiments to answer obvious objections to their theory. For instance, they substituted other exercises designed to increase anxiety--by reminding subjects of an upcoming examination or a painful dental visit--to determine if these thoughts had the same effect as the mortality exercises, but they didn't. It wasn't anxiety per se that triggered worldview defense; it was anxiety specifically about one's own death.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

As Kendall Harmon would say, read the whole thing.

I would add: Anxiety about death is natural, but it also suggests a lack of trust that everything will be OK — in other words, a lack of faith, the faith of Abraham and of Jesus, as lauded by Paul in his letter to the Romans.

Contrast mortality anxiety with the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor's definition of faith as openness to truth, no matter what truth turns out to be — that would seem to be just the opposite of worldview defensiveness.