(c) 2009 Dave Gray (davegrayinfo.com)

There is a very, very strange phenomenon in scientific literature called the decline effect. For some inexplicable reason, many positive scientific effects seem to decline over time as more and more research into the effect is conducted. A theory that seems to be initially supported by overwhelmingly positive evidence can eventually wind up seeming significantly less supported; in some kind of weird way, it may seem like facts are becoming less factual over time.

For example, initial parapsychological research seemed to indicate evidence for psychic ability (ESP in particular), but this effect declined with subsequent studies. A subject of Joseph Banks Rhine who’d initially be able to guess cards vastly over chance in repeated tests gradually became worse at doing so. In fact, over the years this subject became able to guess cards barely above chance.

Jonathan Schooler, who posited the theory of verbal overshadowing, i.e. describing something impairs the ability to remember it more so than just observing something, noticed a similar decline in his results. Since the initial publication of verbal overshadowing theory in 1990, he’s found it increasingly harder to demonstrate positive results. He called it “cosmic habituation”, and joked that the cosmos was interfering in his studies.

Regression to the mean

Some scientists link this to the statistical effect called regression to the mean; the phenomenon that if a variable is extreme on its first measurement, by the second measurement it will be closer to the average. Initial statistical flukes which may have occurred in the first studies will even out over time, according to this theory. Statistical flukes can sneak into even the best of studies, which is why a large number of studies are required to test a single phenomenon; only multiple, large data sets in numerous and distinct conditions can lead towards acceptable of a particular theory. The problem with this explanation for the decline effect is that in many of these early studies with positive results, the data is large enough to render the existence of overly positive statistical flukes highly improbable; at least, it would be highly unlikely to see these positive flukes occurring across a wide number of studies with large data sets. Yes, there should be some fluctuation in results over time, but a noticeable downward trend in effect cannot be explained by regression to the mean.

Unpublished results

There is another potential explanation for this effect; academic journals are highly skewed towards publishing positive results, which hides the true number of negative scientific studies. The vast majority of negative scientific results remain unpublished because of this bias. This is a pervasive problem the world over, and is likely to be skewing the available scientific data pertaining to certain phenomena. When it turned out Eli Lilly (the makers of antidepressants like Prozac) had withheld the results of about a third of the trials conducted to win government approval, the clinical community was up in arms (and quite rightly so).

Unfortunately, this is par the course for contemporary science. Why is this occurring? One possible reason is that companies have a vested interest in publishing only positive results for their products, be they drugs, medical devices or shampoo. This is likely to be the case with Prozac. After all, if you can show your drug to have a great positive body of evidence supporting it then doctors and patients are more likely to prescribe it/buy it. Another possibility is that researchers simply feel like they have failed if they produce negative results. If you have spent years designing a study, carefully selecting your variables, experimental design and hypotheses, getting your hopes up that you might discover a new effect, then a set of negative results may come as a crushing blow. Furthermore, journals are just not that willing to publish negative results. They’re just not as exciting. If anything, negative results may end up harming someone’s entire life’s work, or cause researchers to lose funding.

Unfortunately, as worrying as this is, unpublished results are not the explanation for the decline effect. For one, they don’t explain the personal academic strife of someone like Schooler, who repeatedly failed to replicate his own positive findings in his own future studies. Furthermore, it doesn’t explain initial positive studies that weren’t published. The decline effect has occurred to researchers regardless of whether they published the data or not.

Source: viscousplatypus on flickr

So what the hell is going on?

To be honest, the jury is out here. It could be any number of things. Regression to the mean could be partially to blame, along with unpublished results. Perphaps, as mentioned here, we should stop treating the results of the “soft sciences” (psychology, biology and the like) as factual, but rather as tending towards a soft truth. There may be no actual static reality to be measured here – just a useful approximation towards something like it. Apparently, the decline effect doesn’t occur in physics.

The thing to remember here is that science is not an infallible, immutable entity. Scientists are just people, and people behave rather strangely sometimes (and especially in large numbers). All humans suffer from various cognitive biases, regardless of how smart and well educated you are. One of the most problematic for science is that humans hugely enjoy confirming a hypothesis, and really hate it when a hypothesis is not confirmed. There could be large amounts of unknowing selective reporting happening on a regular basis, with researchers subconsciously working towards rational and acceptable ways to demonstrate that their hypothesis is correct without necessarily exploring the data as fully as they could have.

Jonathan Lehrer, in his famous article on the decline effect, states this:

One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials. Between 1966 and 1995, there were forty-seven studies of acupuncture in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and every single trial concluded that acupuncture was an effective treatment. During the same period, there were ninety-four clinical trials of acupuncture in the United States, Sweden, and the U.K., and only fifty-six per cent of these studies found any therapeutic benefits. As Palmer notes, this wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see. Our beliefs are a form of blindness.

Lehrer has been accused of being too critical of scientific method, but that is not necessarily fair. He is giving us a fair warning: it is possible for even the brightest and honest of researchers to make mistakes, with subconscious cognitive biases guiding them towards a particular result.

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Sleep Deprivation

Credit: Kevin Lawver

A decent amount if REM sleep is needed to allow us to recharge our brains and prepare us for the next day ahead. Unfortunately, if you are a parent, the luxury of sleep is not something you will be afforded this Christmas. You stay up late to put the Children’s presents under the tree, knock back the glass of milk and cookies you have “left for Santa” and trudge on to bed… only for a hyper child to rush into your bedroom at 6am demanding presents RIGHT NOW.

It’s no secret that your body needs rest to be at its best, but not sleeping enough can have lasting damage on your body. Sleep allows us to consolidate memories during REM, processing events and filing them away. Forgoing that process means problems for your hippocampus, the part of your brain associated with memory. Though it may be tempting to soldier through the night, the entire point of the holidays is to create long-lasting happy memories, so don’t do them a disservice by preventing your brain’s filing mechanism.

Dopamine and Adrenaline Cocktails

Credit: Sunridin

When your body’s chemistry is already compromised, putting it through an adrenalin-fuelled activity like opening Christmas gifts isn’t really optimal. If you analyse what is going on in a typical child’s brain when they open gifts you will notice an increased amount of adrenalin, dopamine and serotonin, all neurochemicals that promote a heightened sense of pleasure. Dopamine, for instance, is the neurochemical primarily affected by stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine. Although your child is not exactly comparable to some kind of stimulant-filled drug field, I am sure many parents will testify that they struggle to see the difference on Christmas day. A study conducted by Bryn Mawr University has examined the effects of large amount of dopamine on the brain which shown evidence of people losing their ability to reason in order to achieve satisfaction. The expectation of so many gifts and amazing food on Christmas day can potentially be compared to an addict just about to take their next hit: the giddy desperation for it to be Christmas morning right now has surely been felt by everyone at some point in their lives.

Christmas Dinner

Credit: whatleydude

When you’re going to be cooking all day, the urge to skip this meal might be strong, but you’ll do better throughout the day if you have a breakfast with lean proteins (which release dopamine and norepinephrine for greater alertness) and quality carbohydrates (which release serotonin to improve your mood and satisfy your hunger). The typical quick meal contains loads of sodium, sugar and fat, which will spike your blood pressure and leave you bouncing between highs and lows. That coffee is also likely caffeinated, and caffeine puts your body in a state of alertness and fight or flight. When your body is already on high-alert, adding a sugar rush and the thrill of opening presents is a recipe for a mid-morning crash. After waking up at a reasonable hour, invite the family to breakfast, and save the presents for after.

Christmas dinner is also a big-time offender when it comes to wreaking havoc on your body, and that’s not limited to your waistline. It’s no surprise that alcohol impairs thought functions like judgment and energy levels, but since alcohol does nothing to affect satiety, you may consume more than you’d ordinarily like. Holiday foods may also have an impact on insulin resistance, which can flood your bloodstream with sugar, creating highs and lows and possibly leading to problems later on.

When you’re crashed from dinner, interaction falls to a standstill. Children often head off to their rooms to test out their new toys, and adults are unmotivated to keep the conversation flowing. If your body is low on dopamine, social situations become an anxious affair or simply not worthwhile. Avoid this by packing in the protein during dinner and leaving the calming carbs to a tasting portion. Christmas is the highlight of family events; don’t spend it snippy, worn out or unmotivated. Pay attention to your body’s chemistry to get the perfect formula for success.

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Internet addiction is a growing concern, and there are quite a few writers who’ve written on the topic. Damien Thompson  identifies how technologists are getting better and better at “the distilling of pleasures”. Bill Davidow writes about the rewards that exist for web companies to ramp up the addictiveness of their sites in an online world where users are always connected, and hence there are no physical barriers to indulging in addictive behaviour.

Few though have written about the actual techniques that are used to retain users’ attention, which is what I will be writing on here. My aim isn’t to say they are all inherently bad; after all they work because they appeal to us. However, I think it is useful to recognise what they are, and to recognise their role in driving compulsive behaviour.

First, for those who don’t know – what stickiness is and why it’s vital for web companies

As with older forms of addiction like alcohol or tobacco, there are people who directly benefit from the compulsive behaviour of others. For those who make their living running websites which make money from advertising, feeding this behaviour by increasing their sites’ “stickiness” (the extent to which a site compels users to stick around on and return to it) is absolutely vital to ensure their competitiveness, as more time spent on site = more clicks on ads.

The open design of the web causes intense competition for users’ attention. The user has made no financial investment in most sites they visit, and little investment of attention either; the effort required to move to another site is no more than that of looking further within the current one. Therefore a big goal in designing a successful website will be for it to be sticky.

The techniques for achieving this goal that I have noticed can be divided into two forms. The first is to make the presentation of content irresistible, and the second is to remove the ‘break point’ in the browsing experience where the user could say to themself “I’ll stop here.”

The numbered list (a bite-sized, oh so moreish nugget of information)

The substance you’re consuming on the internet is information, and the numbered list on a compulsive topic is a way of packaging this substance to make it irresistible and easily digestible. But why would a list be more compulsive than an article? Lists capitalise on people’s desire for order and completion; you know exactly what you’re getting out of it, after which you’re free (you hope) to do something else.  What cracked.com, seen here, hopes, is that you’ll read another list.

Social proof from social plugins

Everyone knows social media is an especially compulsive form of online interaction, because our social relationships are one of the things we care the most about. Andrew wrote about this on this site last year. Social plugins are an attempt to leverage the power of social media to improve our personal engagement with traditional media. Sharing and commenting on articles that are socially enabled makes them more compulsive by bringing them into the real world of our social relationships. The fact that the information is coming from a personally trusted source can’t hurt either.

Gamification (Making boring things fun)

Gamification incentivises people to continue using a site with virtual rewards, like badges, points, or other signs of achievement. Examples like the one above (linkedin) appeal to the satisfaction we gain from completeness, while ones like that below (reddit) use a sense of achievement and competitiveness to drive engagement. One studyⁱ on gamification listed the psychological functions these virtual badges serve: including goal setting, reputation, status/affirmation, and group identification. So gamification can give a structure and a goal to what we may otherwise see as aimless activity.

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Hume and Kant

Such prominent writers on aesthetics as Hume and Kant more-or-less took it for granted that aesthetic experience, at least of beauty, was pleasurable in and of itself, or was perhaps itself a special form of pleasure. Of course they acknowledged that not everyone will take pleasure in the same art, but largely attributed this to, say, prejudice, lack of sensory refinement or a less-than-wholly disinterested attitude. On these sorts of assumptions, taking pleasure in art is a condition on proper aesthetic judgement of art. Claiming not to take pleasure in a play of Shakespeare’s, then, will be tantamount either to saying that it is not good art, or that one is not a good judge.

Of course both Hume’s and Kant’s positions are much more subtle and interesting than the caricature sketched above, but I think that the prominence of the idea of pleasure and enjoyment as an appropriate aesthetic response holds in their thought has had a huge effect on the way we often frame issues of enjoyment and understanding in art.

Common terms applied to engagement with art

Let’s look at a couple of terms commonly applied to engagement with art.

The verb ‘to get’, when used with relation to art, has complicated connotations. On the one hand, it is used to signify a beneficial experience of art which might be linked with or equated to pleasure. Hence, “Now that I get it, I love listening to opera.” But more often it is used to signify a lack of enjoyment of particular art, as in, “I’m sick of pretending: I don’t ‘get’ art.” ‘Getting’ something is also linked to understanding, as in, “I don’t get the joke.” Here liking and understanding come together: the speaker does not find the joke funny (enjoy it), but they are attributing this to a lack of some knowledge or understanding relevant to enjoying the joke.

Of course, in both cases, “I don’t get it,” can be used rhetorically by the speaker to imply that the reason they don’t get it is because there is nothing to get. Here the speaker implies that their understanding is perfectly sufficient, and that their reason for not enjoying the art/joke lies in the art/joke, not with them. There is no clear-cut philosophy of aesthetic appreciation implied by our use of ‘to get’ with relation to art, but its prominence in casual discussion hints at a link between enjoyment and understanding like the one described above, and one which may lead to the assumption that people who don’t enjoy, say, Shakespeare’s work, simply don’t ‘get’ it.

A second very commonly used word is ‘to appreciate’. This word seems even more clearly to denote enjoyment, and to predicate it as a central part of aesthetic response. I think that Wittgenstein’s remarks on this word provide quite an interesting alternative perspective, however. He invites us to imagine a person who expresses great enjoyment when they hear a poem in a language they don’t understand. This person, although they clearly enjoy the poem in some way, don’t seem to count as appreciating it, because they can’t understand a word of it. Appreciation is not simply a response to art, but a certain type of engagement with it. And this engagement need not be pleasurable as such.

We might agree that someone appreciates a piece of music if they can recall and describe it, have a feel for the tone of emotion conveyed by a certain bit, notice where new instruments join and where motifs are repeated. And this might hold even if they profess not to enjoy the piece at all, or to think it is a bad work.

Overly intellectualised?

I do not want to paint an overly intellectualised picture of artistic appreciation, and the above is of course not the only way one can manifest one’s appreciation of a work. Indeed, I am inclined to agree with Wittgenstein that “It is not only difficult to describe what appreciation consists in, but impossible. To describe what it consists in we would have to describe the whole environment.” (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Section 20) It can consist in a great many things, and many of these will be highly specific to given occasions. What I think is clear is that if we rely too heavily on enjoyment and pleasure as markers of aesthetic response, then we lose much of the rich detail of everyday aesthetic engagement.

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(Editor’s note: the views and opinions of the authors are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or other authors)

The debate over the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is one of the most intense and complex debates in American history. With polls showing that just over half of Americans oppose the law and just under half support it, the debate seems destined to continue. Many observers in the UK, Western Europe and other parts of the world where government-funded, single-payer healthcare systems have been in place for decades are genuinely confused by this debate. In particular they wonder why half of the American population is resistant to greater access to healthcare for those who don’t now have that access or who find themselves struggling with the current system. It seems incomprehensible that this would be the case.

Cultural context

When analyzing the opposition to Obamacare one must take into account the complex dynamics of American history, cultural philosophies and the current political polarization in the American system. Those who oppose Obamacare would argue that the debate is framed incorrectly. To them it is not a debate about whether people should have access to excellent healthcare. They would argue that everyone most certainly should have that access. To them the debate is about how American citizens gain access to healthcare. They argue the debate is about insurance coverage, not healthcare, and about who will provide insurance coverage for Americans: private employers or the government.

Conservative distrust of federal government

Here, American history and cultural patterns have to be taken into account. There has always been a large segment of the US population that distrusts the federal government and will reject any new effort by that government to expand its power. For the roughly 40% of Americans who self identify as conservative, resisting an increase in the size of the federal government is a cultural absolute. They are not arguing that government should not exist at all; they are just much more comfortable with local and state governments than the government removed in distant Washington. For two centuries, this cultural strain has run through U.S. history. With a continent to explore, early Americans could “light out” as Mark Twain put it and if a certain area became too congested or the local leaders too intrusive, one could just move to a place where there were fewer people and even less government, where success depended on hard work and self reliance. In other parts of the world with limited land, where populations grew and developed in smaller areas, there developed a stronger sense of community and cohesiveness; a sense of “we are all in this together” if you will. In the US, this mindset developed in the larger cities, but the traditional conservative attitude of resistance to government remained strong in suburban and rural areas. In the 20th century this resulted in most Europeans accepting a larger role for government in their lives but in the US, a significant number of people remaining opposed to larger government and what they consider government intrusion into their lives.

Opposition to new government action

Playing a large role in the opposition to Obamacare is the historical tendency for government programs in the US to cost more than originally suggested and be less effective than advertised. In countries where government action is more accepted the response to these issues would be to address what is wrong and make it better. The premise of course, being that the government action was appropriate and needed. In the US, the response is often more of an “I told you so” from those who opposed the government action all along. Coming from a mindset that the federal government often makes things worse, any deviation from the initial government proposal is seen as a vindication of the conservative views. Of course, the cultural and political divides in the US ensure that government action will never be fully effective. With 40% of the population opposing any new government action and 40% advocating more government action it is the 20% of the population that doesn’t really care that swings each election. This means that the party that favors government action will gain power and increase the role of government and then four or eight years later the party that opposes government power will come in and try to weaken or remove what has been put into place.

Partisan politics

Finally, pure partisan politics cannot be taken out of the equation. There is a significant segment of the population that opposes anything the other party does. This is true of members of both major political parties in the US. In this case, there are some conservatives who oppose Obamacare simply because President Obama and Democrats proposed, passed, and signed it into law. For these Republicans, the fear is that given time to take root in the American system, most Americans will get used to Obamacare and come to support it, thus giving Democrats some advantage in future elections. Since Democrats are the party of government action, any action by the government that comes to be seen positively should strengthen that party.

Understanding the opposition to Obamacare

It may remain hard for those outside the US to understand why anyone, let alone a large group of people, would oppose more access to healthcare, and in the end, many may never understand it. A greater understanding of American history, cultural and politics, however, will at least help explain why there is opposition and how those who oppose Obamacare, come to their point of view.

About the Author: This post is brought to you by RedPetitions.com, a leading site for conservative causes where you can start or sign a petition for free.

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If free will does not exist, then we should not praise good behaviours.

Can we behave as though free will doesn’t exist? What would we do if we believed that all human behaviour (and everything else, for that matter) was determined by causal chains which stretch back to the Big Bang? What would we make of other people’s behaviour? Would we still judge them for bad actions and praise them for good actions? Would we ever punish any criminals? Would we award prizes to those who’ve performed well?

Scientific evidence

After all, if we don’t believe in free will, all of these actions are not caused by the person themselves. They are caused by a series of causal chains affecting their bodies, brains, and everything else around them, which stretch back a great distance into the past. Unless we’re willing to state that souls or other spiritual entities exist and have some as yet unknown effect on causality, all the best scientific evidence we have points to the fact that free will is illusory. Plenty of people in the world believe this to be the truth. The problem is, however, that these same individuals walk around judging people, praising people, assigning moral and political responsibility as though everyone still has free will. Why?

Can we act as though free will doesn’t exist?

John Hinckley Jr. famously pleaded insanity after shooting Reagan.

There is, perhaps, one way which we can behave as though free will doesn’t exist. Consider this: it is commonly understood that if a person lacks the ability to control their behaviour, then their punishments for criminal activities are significantly reduced. This usually means that if a criminal can be legally classified as insane, then – rather than being imprisoned – they are treated and rehabilitated. If we apply this argument to all criminals (given that no one is in control of their actions) then rather than attempting to punish, we should attempt to treat and rehabilitate every single criminal. This seems like a plausible thing to do. It is, at least, possible in practice.

However, truly behaving as though free will doesn’t exist would mean ceasing all praise and blame for every single person in the world, even yourself. Our entire system of moral and political responsibility, including all praise and blame, would have to go. You only have to think about this for a second to realise the havok this would wreak. Image everyone displaying utter indifference to every possible behaviour in the world. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Insanity

Diogenes of Sinope

Of course, not everyone believes that free will does not exist. It is only a minority of people who hold this belief. If these people were to behave as though moral and political praise and blame are worthless, however, they would likely be classified as insane; individuals unfit for living in normal society.

There have been instances in the past of people behaving in line with their (seemingly) outlandish philosophical beliefs who would, in contemporary thought, be regarded as insane. Perhaps the most famous is Diogenes of Sinope, an Ancient Greek philosopher. A widely reported anecdote states that:

he destroyed his only possession, a single wooden bowl, on seeing a peasant boy drink from the hollow of his hands. He used to stroll about in full daylight with a lamp, because he claimed to be looking for an honest man. He lavishly praised the virtues of dogs (which eat anything, make no fuss about where to sleep, perform natural bodily functions in public without unease, and know instinctively who is friend and who is foe), all of which makes them superior to humans in his view. At one time, he poured scorn on Plato’s characterization of man as a featherless biped, by bringing a plucked chicken into the lecture room. He is also credited with the first known use of the word ”cosmopolitan”, claiming to be a “cosmopolites” (“citizen of the world”).

He showed his rejection of “normal” ideas about human decency by eating in the street, masturbating in the marketplace, urinating on those who insulted him, defecating in the theatre, and pointing at people with his middle finger.

I remember reading another anecdote some time ago, again from Ancient Greece, in which a follower of Zeno of Elea (famous for his paradoxes of motion) was wandering around the streets waving his arms around, shouting that everything was an illusion because motion could not exist. At one point in this frantic outburst he dislocated his shoulder. A doctor came to his side, but before putting his arm back into its socket said something along the lines of:

I’d like to put your arm back into its socket, but Zeno teaches us that at the smallest moment in time, everything is neither moving to where it is, nor moving to where it is not. I cannot move your arm to where it is not, because no time elapses for it to move there; nor can I move it to where it is, because it is already there. At the smallest instances of time, your arm is motionless. If everything is motionless at every instant, and time is entirely composed of instants, then I can’t move your arm back into its socket.

Zeno of Elea

The anecdote concludes with the follower of Zeno giving up his beliefs on the spot and begging for the doctor to put his arm back into its socket.

Neither of these anecdotes may be wholly true, but they illustrate a point well. Individuals may feel very strongly about certain beliefs (including the non-existence of free will) but acting on these beliefs can lead to behaviour that would typically be considered to be insane. If beliefs could lead to behaviour that contradicts too much with societal norms of human behaviour, then in order to exist functionally in that society, it is best to avoid acting like you have these beliefs.

Innate moral responsibility?

It feels like there is more than this, however. It doesn’t seem right that everyone who believes that free will doesn’t exist only keeps giving moral and political praise and blame because they don’t want to seem insane. They just naturally keep acting as though free will exists.

I’ve studied free will and moral responsibility over the years and long ago came to the conclusion that free will cannot exist. Yet I still walk around approbating moral praise and blame and always have. It would just feel wrong not to. It feels almost like I’m unable not to. There is a feeling of innateness here; perhaps moral responsibility is, in some fashion, hardwired into the human brain?

Moral responsibility module

There could be a moral responsibility mental module. A module is a computational system in the brain that is hypothesised to both aid and constrain cognition. The best example of a module is the language acquisition device (first proposed by Chomsky), which was proposed to explain several strange features of language learning and use.

Noam Chomsky

Children learn language very quickly, with little or no explicit tuition and from relatively little data. Furthermore, once a child has learned a language and grown into an adult, the task of learning a second language becomes extremely difficult and the process becomes very slow, with lots of tuition required and a need to be exposed to very large amount of language data. Chomsky argued that this could be explained by an innate mechanism that contains a large amount of grammatical parameters and directs a pre-speaking child towards important features of the language data all around them in the first few years of life. This is referred to as the “critical period” for language learning. Once it has passed, the language acquisition module becomes inactive, making it very difficult to learn a language later in life.

Importantly, modules are supposed to be specialised (they only process a single kind of information), informationally encapsulated (they don’t need any other mental systems in order to function), and fast in their operation (very fast, i.e. a split second). This is important because if a moral responsibility module exists, then it will operate quickly in response to moral behaviour regardless of an individual’s other beliefs; exactly what I have been discussing. Essentially, this module would constrain cognition in a way that forces people to make moral responsibility judgements despite other beliefs they may have, such as free will not existing.

So there we have it: people can say what they want about free will, but they will undoubtedly find it impossible to stop behaving as though others have free will. Their moral responsibility modules will take care of that.

Other articles that may interest you

Why do people care so little about stealing music? – in which I discuss other moral behaviours (related to illegally obtaining music) from a psychological perspective.

Daddy love dubstep: what children can teach us about our music tastes and listening habits – discusses psychological aspects of taste and what children can teach us about our adult tastes.

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The beautiful simplicity of the video above, in which a Kindness song is broken down and demonstrated to a young boy, is effective because it explores the dynamic of young children being introduced to contemporary ‘adult’ culture. Videos working on this theme have been repeatedly popular over the past few years. Whether they are candidly reviewing Skrillex at a makeshift disco, harmonising their way through Ariel Pink tracks or simply waking up and having an instinctive bop to Waka Flocka Flame, there is clearly something we find endlessly fascinating about children interacting with music from outside the mainstream cultural frame, which would otherwise be unlikely to enter their sphere.

In his article ‘Milo’s Musical Education: Can you teach your kid to have taste?‘, Justin Davidson outlines how we often separate the youngest generation from what we might deem to be ‘grown-up culture’:

“If we want to be part of our children’s aesthetic world, then why do we equivocate about bringing them into ours? We wall off grown-up culture behind a barrier of ratings, warning labels, and vigilant software. We leave it to educators to filter the arts for consumption by the allegedly innocent. We are terrified of exposing children to material they might not understand, whether because its too crude or too complex”.

Kindness teaching a child to play his song “House”

This article has nothing to do with the morality of introducing children to contemporary alternative culture; what Davidson’s excerpt encapsulates, though, is how we often create a stern division between what children are exposed to and what adults are. Much ‘alternative’ music might be considered too progressive, obscure or intelligent for a younger mind to fully appreciate, which is why the video of the Kindness ‘House’ lesson works so well. The world of grown-up art and the world of children become one again, and the song is stripped down to its elements and re-displayed in a way that the child can begin to understand.

Ideas of taste

To be a fan of Kindness, you’ll be at least slightly clued up about contemporary music. You probably actively engage in independently searching out music that you like and have deliberate, considered taste – all of which distinguishes you from the average child. Musical taste might even form a part of your identity and of the way that you see yourself.

In This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel J. Levitin maps the evolution of music taste. Starting before birth via the muffled sounds that filter through to the womb, music appreciation evolves as children develop firstly consonance, followed by dissonance and a more complex appreciation of sound. With adolescence comes the more mature emotional capability to connect with music, take meaning and value from it, and form deep attachments to songs and artists. What is interesting about these videos of children is that we encounter human beings in the earliest stages of their musical encounters, experiencing music in the freshest and most innocent way, even if the music we see them interact with is associated solely with people in their late teens or above.

Bon Iver biting a Grammy.

Once we arrive at a point in our lives where music taste is defined, our cognitive habits can be peculiar. It can be difficult, for example, to avoid a level of snobbery – the word pretentious often comes up in discussions of alternative music, and in almost all discussions of art. This might cognitively take the form of a feeling of superior opposition to people ‘not in the know’, or a quiet ambivalence when an artist held in personal esteem moves from private discovery to household name. I can’t say I feel anywhere near the same affection for Bon Iver since he ascended from lonesome lovesick cabin crooner to globe-straddling arena main event, despite enjoying both of his albums equally; right up to date, I’m hoping Frank Ocean‘s emergence from Odd Future‘s R&B side piece to critically acclaimed stand-alone star won’t have a similarly detrimental effect. But its a curious notion, this altering of perceptions – are we merely in a continuous search for something which feels our own, to distinguish ourselves from the collective mass, a desire for individuality within an individualistic society? Do we lose a feeling of excitement and intrigue once an artist emerges from the shadows for all to see (and are human beings innately attracted to mystery and the enigmatic)? Or does our evaluation of the quality of art simply become humbled in the face of mounting hype and acclaim, a relativist shift in perception caused by external influence?

I’m not going to attempt to answer that question, but merely considering it highlights the layers of thought and the cognitive habits the human mind contends with when in the process of something so simple as listening to music. With all of this to battle with, there then develops the obvious potential for a deep disconnection from what instinctively draws us, as human beings, to enjoy music so intuitively in the first place. With too much analysis taste can become an artificial, abstracted thing, detached from the visceral thrill of enjoying sound in the most basic way (a premise applicable to any form of art). Introducing children into the equation is a very effective way to prompt a reconsideration of the experience of music, at the most innate level of aesthetic experience.

Innate reactions of children to music

This is what makes us smile when the child wakes up to Waka Flocka and instinctively bobs his head and waves his hands around like a G – instinctive pleasure mixed with, we can assume, imitative behaviour. The study ‘Rhythmic engagement with music in infancy‘ suggests how “it is the beat rather than other features of the music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants. We also found that the better the children were able to synchronise their movements with the music, the more they smiled.” Though the ability appears to be innate in humans, the researchers aren’t sure why it evolved. They found that babies moved their arms, hands, legs, feet, torsos and heads in response to music, much more than to speech.

The internet famous PS22 Chorus – may or may not be doing a rendition of ‘Round and Round’.

The contrast between how we perceive child and adult reactions to music is also what makes this PS22 Chorus rendition of ‘Round and Round’ by Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti so haunting – it sounds fairly casual hearing Pink sing “I’m afraid, you’re afraid, and we die, and we live, and we’re born again”, but coming from a choir of children the effect is pronouncedly and invasively eerie. The recent Noisey series, in which children discuss Azealia Banks and Radiohead, consume sweets on a dancefloor whilst reflecting on the artistic merits of Skrillex, and interview The Cribs, particularly highlight the creation of fluidity between the ‘real world’ and the somewhat internalised and private world of alternative music and ‘grown-up culture’.

With the internet now central to modern methods of music discovery and consumption, the formation and exploration of taste is possibly as isolated and solitary an experience as it has ever been. Music aficionados have always been engaged with music which exists separate from the consciousness of the general public, but at least those deep into punk in the ’70s relied on record stores, fanzines and concerts – we’re at the point now where there is no requirement for interaction with the outside world for keeping on the ball about music. Musicians without record deals or singles sell out large concerts off the back of internet presence alone. This is also a key factor on why its amusing to hear a child comment on what they think of Azealia Banks, who rose to fame largely from the viral success of the ’212′ video. When online buzz can be the main driving force behind an artists’ success, hearing a child mention their name can be an uncanny reminder that the real world and the online world are synonymous with one another.

Personal experience

We can probably all recall moments when music infiltrated our formative years in ways we didn’t fully comprehend at the time. When I was ten I’m sure I listened to Eminem‘s ‘The Real Slim Shady‘ at least 1,000 times, it being the only CD single I possessed to play on my brand spanking new Sony walkman. All I knew was that I loved the beat, the melody, and the way the words sounded, were pronounced and delivered. I certainly didn’t know what a clitoris was, what it would mean if a man and a man were to elope, or what it was to give head. These ideas, contained in the lyrics, sailed over my own head without arousing the slightest suspicion, and it didn’t matter one iota. I simply loved the track and the way it sounded. Any deep, analytical understanding was an entirely unnecessary condition for my enjoyment.

The Real Slim Shady, plus small child

A particularly puzzling notion in relation to taste is that of the ‘guilty pleasure‘. So, I really enjoy ‘Make Up Bag‘ by The-Dream, and its a genuine experience of pleasure informing this enjoyment, and still something dictates silently that it is a guilty pleasure. Maybe because who I am in real life doesn’t coincide with the archetypal R&B fan; maybe because the song seems a little shallow (and I obviously see myself as deep); maybe just because I’ll probably never drop five stacks on a make up bag so its hard to sing along without a sense of irony. Or more pertinently, perhaps because I feel deep down that the song doesn’t represent me, doesn’t play into my self-image, and so my enjoyment has to be from a perspective of minor detachment.

It’s confounding to label any pleasure as a guilty one when all that denotes it as such is a delusion of calibre and taste, linked to self-image. The peculiar idea of encountering music that you enjoy but rationally feel you shouldn’t, the separation of reason and enjoyment is rooted in the Western analytic philosophical tradition which teaches us that reason can be pure and disinterested, detached from emotion. And if I tried to explain any of this interplay to a child listening to the song, the vast blank face staring back would speak volumes. The human mind devotes a considerable amount of time and energy toward building up an idea of self, of creating rules, and taste and aesthetic experience becomes regulated within this entirely self-constructed framework. But to a child, Eminem, The-Dream, Kindness and Skrillex are all just music, which you either like or you don’t.

Bringing the elderly into the discussion

This woman isn’t exactly a fan of Skrillex.

With all of this to contemplate, I’d like to end by considering the opposite end of the scale – the elderly. For one thing, they certainly prove no less entertaining or popular when they’re providing opinions on Skrillex. The amusement is clearly focused around the mild bewilderment of people in their twilight years being confronted with the aggressive bass womps of Skrillex; but in other instances, focusing on the relationship between the elderly and music can be just as evocative of the power of music as the videos featuring children. This video in particular, in which a dementia patient is suddenly animated and articulate as a result of hearing a song from his youth, is a beautiful example of the power of music.

In Oliver Sacks‘ Musicophilia, he illustrates the depth of our relationship to music when he talks of how “music therapy with [dementia] patients is possible because musical perception, musical sensibility, musical emotion and musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory have disappeared”, recalling the anecdote of how Friedrich Nietzsche continued to play the piano long after he had been rendered mute, demented and partially paralysed. For all of the concerns of taste, integrity, and the elements of competitiveness that music fans can busy themselves with, watching both the very young and the very old engaging with music is a profound reminder that a huge part of the enjoyment we take from music comes from a very basic, childlike and emotional part of us.

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The subject matter can be anything related to culture, art, and ideas, despite how vague that sounds. I’ve written about debates stemming from video games, modern art, music, politics, and psychology. The aim is to write about interesting topics in a well researched and well argued fashion.

If you’re interested, get in touch: andrew.david.hirst1@gmail.com.

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A conservative doing himself no favours.

There’s been a political psychology firestorm happening recently: several studies have emerged which seem to suggest that conservative attitudes are linked to lower cognitive ability, prejudice, and low-effort thinking. This isn’t a new debate; a study from 2009 showed that higher childhood intelligence predicts a tendency to vote for left of centre parties and to be more politically engaged in adulthood. Several studies from the late 90s and early 00s link the personality trait openness to experience with both intelligence and left-wing attitudes, which means that left-wing people tend to be more tolerant and open to different lifestyles and attitudes, and this element of personality is correlated with higher intelligence.

All this research points towards the conclusion that people with low intelligence and cognitive ability tend towards conservatism, but this obviously does not then mean that all conservatives are of low intelligence and cognitive ability (that would be the fallacy of affirming the consequent). The research actually indicates this:

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.

John Stuart Mill, in a Parliamentary debate with the Conservative MP, John Pakington (May 31, 1866)

Taking a step back

As a left-wing person myself, I know how tempting it is to jump for joy at the data in these studies and allow oneself to feel smug and self-righteous. I mean, I must be more intelligent, right? As with most things in life, however, things aren’t quite that simple. Let’s take a step back for a second and think about the data and what conclusions we should draw from it.

Figure 1 – US Electoral Results, 2008

Education level and political affiliation

Education level correlates with intelligence; IQ levels can be used to predict educational achievement. As such, there appears to be a causal link between intelligence and educational achievement. If intelligence can predict educational attainment, and intelligence can predict political orientation, we should expect, based on the aforementioned studies, for the more educated to be more left-wing. When we look at educational achievement and voter behaviour, however, the picture is extremely complicated.

Figure 2 – UK 2010 election results

Rural voting and educational achievement

It is a well known fact that rural voters in both the UK and the US tend to vote for right-wing candidates more so than their urban counterparts, who tend to vote for left-wing candidates. Figure 1 and figure 2 demonstrate this fact nicely (note: in the UK map, red = Labour, blue = Conservative, yellow and green = a variety of parties, including Liberal Democrats, Green Party, Plaid Cymru, and the Scottish National Party). If less intelligent people tend to be right-wing, and intelligence can predict educational achievement, then we should expect those living in urban centres to be better educated.

Data from the Statistical Digest of Rural England, however, indicate that people in rural England get better results at GCSE and are more likely to go into Higher Education than their urban counterparts. The areas that tend to vote conservatively are more likely to be better educated. This looks like a simple case of educational attainment correlating with a tendency to conservatism. As I shall explain later, however, there are caveats to this ignored by this analysis of this data.

US voting and level of education

How about the US? This data, taken from the 2004 election, is very telling (data taken from CNN):

Look at how many college students voted for Bush. It seems that more education (until you reach postgrad level) correlates (or, at least, correlated during this election) with more right-wing votes. An analysis of the data from the 2008 election showed that there was no correlation between education and actual vote cast. Interestingly, however, during this election, polls indicated that those with a university degree significantly favoured Obama to McCain. This is more in line with the stereotypical image of university campuses flooded with ultra left-wing hippie types. The voter data, however, suggests that this picture is not as simple as it seems. It looks like those with higher levels of education are more likely to say they are liberal, but this does not necessarily translate into actually voting for the left-wing candidate.

Putting up a liberal pretense?

Satoshi Kanazawa, in this paper, notes that the US General Social Survey data shows that self-identified liberals in the are significantly more likely to agree with the statements:

It is the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes

and

The government in Washington ought to reduce the income differences between the rich and the poor, perhaps by raising the taxes of wealthy families or by giving income assistance to the poor

and less likely to agree with the statement

The government should not concern itself with reducing this income difference between the rich and the poor.

However, even though the more intelligent respondents were more likely to identify themselves as liberals, they were also less likely to agree with the first two statements. It seems they identify themselves as liberal, but don’t actually agree with specific elements of left-wing political ideology.

This is where it gets even more complicated. As Kanazawa notes, nonblack liberal respondents are significantly more likely to agree with the statement

Blacks have been discriminated against for so long that the government has a special obligation to help improve their living standards

and less likely to agree with the statement

The government should not be giving special treatment to blacks.

Interestingly, given the previous results, more intelligent nonblack GSS respondents are more likely to agree that the government has a special obligation to help blacks. Furthermore, more intelligent GSS respondents of all races are more likely to state that the amount of their federal income tax is too low. These are the same people who disagreed that the government should concern itself with reducing the income disparity between rich and poor. Clearly, these results are conflicting and difficult to read. This study would seem to suggest that intelligence has some relation to political liberalism, but it’s not obvious exactly what that is.

Too broad, wrong variables

So many different sources of data show contradictory results about political identity and actual political beliefs, and educational level and political affiliation. The most likely explanation for this is that we’re wither measuring the wrong things, or taking a broad-brush approach to variables that should really be broken down into more specific variables. To give a concrete example, the type of degree studied at university might be relevant here. Whilst writing this post I couldn’t find any data to support this, but there is a chance that those studying certain kinds of arts and humanities degrees are more likely to be liberal than those studying vocational courses. Simply talking about levels of education might be too broad, and could be blurring important distinctions. If the kinds of courses studied were used in these data sets, then we might have quite different results. Note: this is an intuition based on anecdotal evidence rather than hard data, but it seems worthy of mention.

Regarding the urban vs rural voting difference, this study focussed on more variables than just a simple, broad definition of rural vs urban in England and found strikingly different results to the previously mentioned study. They argued that a broad-brush approach missed out several important distinctions otherwise ignored; for example, 1) there are large regional differences in rural areas, the South East being particularly affluent in comparison to the North and 2) some rural areas are very well connected to the nearest schools whilst some are much more distant. They also noticed that two pupils attending the same school are more likely to be attaining more similarly to each other than if they went to different schools because 1) they likely to be in the same classes and so might have the same teachers and 2) the school is likely to have the same policies in a number of areas, and 3) likewise schools that are within the same local authority are going to have more similar average attainment than they would if they were in different areas because of common local authority education. They factored these (and a few other observations) into data gathered from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England which is a nationally representative study of young people, started in 2004. They got a rather surprising result: the difference between educational attainment in rural and urban areas disappeared entirely. They also found that for certain ethnic minorities, they performed worse in rural areas than in urban areas, which is likely because there are far fewer ethnic minorities in rural areas and so the minorities that do live there are more likely to feel a sense of cultural isolation and lack a support network.

Final thoughts

There are many more things I could discuss here, but for the sake of space I won’t. I could, for example, discuss how intelligence is measured, and the theories of multiple intelligences that encourage us to move away from a single, standard IQ measure. I could also discuss the important distinction between social conservatism/liberalism and economic conservatism/liberalism. As it is, I’ll leave these for another time. They’re a blog post in themselves.

To conclude, whilst I’m well aware of the temptation to leap at any scientific result that seems to add credence to your political beliefs, we should all strive to be more careful with how we interpret these results. As I have been discussing, things are a lot more complicated than they seem.

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There’s been a bit of a furore recently over a blog post by Emily White, an intern at NPR All Songs Considered and GM of her college radio station, in which she acknowledges that while she has 11,000 songs in her music library, the vast majority have been obtained through borrowing from friends, mix CDs, ripping music from her college radio station, and – yes – even some from file sharing sites. She’s only ever paid for about 15 CDs in her life.

This isn’t particularly surprising; in the internet age, it is astonishingly easy to access music for free, and a huge number of people do – 95% of music downloads in 2008 were illegal. What has surprised many people is her unashamed tone:

“I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience… What I want is one massive Spotify-like catalog of music that will sync to my phone and various home entertainment devices… All I require is the ability to listen to what I want, when I want and how I want it. Is that too much to ask?”

There have been prominent articles condemning and defending this attitude. I don’t wish to get embroiled in a debate about the morality of her post. What I find interesting are the parallels we can draw with other moral behaviour and what this may say about human moral cognition.

Stealing office supplies

By the outrage her post has caused, you’d think that this phenomenon of being unashamed about stealing something is recent and specific to music. This definitely isn’t true. Case in point: it is perfectly normal to steal office supplies. So normal, in fact, that a recent study by Brunel University states that 80% of people do it. More importantly, these people see nothing wrong with doing it. They are as unashamed as Emily White.

At the same time, however, only 13% have shoplifted, and 97% think it dishonest to steal a DVD from a shop. What does this say about people’s moral code? Rationally speaking, stealing music and office supplies is exactly the same as stealing from shops. It is just that: stealing. In each scenario, you are taking a product that isn’t yours without some accepted form of compensation. Why should the fact that you are stealing from a shop make any difference? A principled, Kantian moral stance against stealing would decry all of these behaviours to be wrong.

Moral behaviour is not principled

The thing is, the more morality is studied, the more we have found that moral behaviour and cognition is not principled. While it may seem strange to be against stealing a DVD of a film from a shop but then perfectly fine with stealing the same film online, this is perfectly normal moral “logic”. This is because morality is just not logical. I could describe hundreds of studies in support of this, but I’ll focus on a few particularly interesting ones.

Manipulating emotions changes moral judgements

Wheatley and Haidt (2005) used post-hypnotic suggestion to implant an extra flash of disgust whenever participants read a particular word (“take” for half of the participants; “often” for the other half). Participants were then asked to make judgements about characters in moral scenarios that contained the hypnotically enhanced word. For example:

Congressman Arnold Paxton frequently gives speeches condemning corruption and arguing for campaign finance reform. But he is just trying to cover up the fact that he himself will take bribes from the tobacco lobby, and other special interests, to promote their legislation.

This was given to those who had been hypnotically imprinted to feel disgusted at the word “take”. For those who had been imprinted to feel disgusted at “often”:

Congressman Arnold Paxton frequently gives speeches condemning corruption and arguing for campaign finance reform. But he is just trying to cover up the fact that he himself is often bribed by the tobacco lobby, and other special interests, to promote their legislation.

Participants made harsher judgments of characters in scenarios that contained the hypnotically enhanced word. Some participants even found themselves condemning a character in a story who had done no wrong — a student council representative who “tries to take” or “often picks” discussion topics that would have wide appeal.

The link between stealing music and quitting smoking

To apply this to the case of illegally obtaining music: the people who condemn this behaviour (i.e. the aforementioned article) are usually those who have either worked in the music industry or been in bands. The negative consequences of illegally obtaining music are emotionally salient to them – after all, it is these people who lose out when someone steals their music or the music of their artists. The people illegally obtaining music, in general, aren’t in bands or the industry. The negative consequences of their actions have no emotional salience to them.

Consider the case of anti-smoking ads. Rationally, everyone knows how dangerous smoking is. There have been many visible ad campaigns over the years stating how dangerous it is. Packets of cigarettes contain warnings such as “smoking causes impotence” and “smoking causes lung cancer”. Yet people still start smoking. Recently, however, anti-smoking ads have started to include graphic images of diseased lungs, mouth cancer, corpses, and other nasty examples of the harm caused by smoking. These images are disgusting. They cause a strong emotional response in us, more so than a line of text with a dryly worded fact. And it seems they are effective – this study showed that 50 percent of people remember the text-only warning label, while 83 percent remember the label that contained a graphic image. Whilst we don’t know whether this translates directly into a decision to quit smoking (or a decision to not smoke in the first place) it shows how effective emotional responses are in causing something to be salient to us, i.e. to have personal meaning.

When illegally downloading music, there is no emotionally salient negative image urging us to do otherwise. The main emotion we are feeling is the excitement about getting some new music. Unless images of destitute musicians are plastered all over file sharing sites, then this is unlikely to ever change. When in an actual shop, however, we can see the person who we would be stealing music from. The negative consequences are very salient to us. This explains the disconnect between stealing online and stealing from a shop. We steal from a shop, we’re harming that guy, right there. We steal from the internet, we’re harming a bunch of people I don’t know and can’t see. Emotionally, they mean very little to me.

People often can’t explain their moral judgements

An incredibly fascinating study by Haidt, Björklund, and Murphy demonstrated that people often just don’t know why they’ve made the judgement they have. He presented people with moral scenarios that were designed to make people feel disgusted but which were hard to rationally condemn as being wrong. One of the scenarios involved consensual incest:

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are travelling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it OK for them to make love?

Most people decided it was wrong for the siblings to do this and began searching for reasons to explain their judgement. Some pointed out the dangers of inbreeding, only to remember that Julie and Mark used two forms of birth control. Some argued that Julie and Mark will be hurt emotionally, even though the story makes it clear that no harm will come to them. As it says, it brought them closer. After running through more possible explanations that turn out to be incorrect, they usually stopped and said something like “I don’t know, it’s just wrong”. The researchers termed this moral dumbfounding.

File sharing dumbfounding

The reasons people gave for being against the consensual incest scenario aren’t real reasons: they’re just attempts to justify their gut feeling. This is moral confabulation, which, as this post puts it, is when you dislike something so much that you make stuff up. This also applies to liking something so much that you make stuff up, which is what you see when people attempt to defend stealing music. I might as well call this file sharing dumbfounding. From following this issue for a while, I’ve seen a remarkable number of justifications for this behaviour. Here’s a selection:

1. Sharing files is a basic internet freedom, a fundamental right of the internet. This is the main ideological stance taken by the Pirate Party. The flaw in this stance is obvious. No one is claiming file sharing is wrong. People are claiming illegal file sharing is wrong. Furthermore, it seems there is a conflict of rights here. Rights are a difficult issue, but I’m fairly sure the right to be paid for ones work could also be argued to exist. Rights frequently conflict in this way: recent political developments in the USA have lead to “a right to religious freedoms” being defended by those who wish to act on beliefs that are potentially harmful to others, e.g. anti-homosexuality beliefs. At the same time, one could argue that gay people have a right not to be discriminated against. These two rights are in conflict. If one is claiming a right exists, that does not mean that it necessarily applies all across the board with absolutely no qualifiers.
2. Record companies are evil and treat artists poorly. We’re really stealing from them, not the artists. The problem here is that regardless of what you may think about record labels, you are also depriving the artists of royalties through not paying for their music. There is no question of that not being the case.
3. At least I pay for some music. If a CEO embezzles a large chunk of investors’ money and claims in her defence that she didn’t embezzle some of it, I’m not sure anyone would come out in support of her actions.
4. But I pay to see them live/buy their merchandise. Again, the analogy from 3) applies here.

I could go on. There are a wide variety of confabulations used by people to justify why they are downloading music illegally.

Motivated moral reasoning

Finally, on a related note to the last point, people are motivated moral reasoners. This means that we are more likely to find evidence to support a claim we want to defend and are generally quite bad at rationally weighing up either side of an argument. For example, Kuhn notes that when children and young adults were given evidence that was inconsistent with a theory they favoured, they often: ”either failed to acknowledge discrepant evidence or attended to it in a selective, distorting manner. Identical evidence was interpreted one way in relation to a favored theory and another way in relation to a theory that was not favored” (p. 677).

This study, of course, is looking at children and young adults, not adults. The thing is, I could have chosen any study from hundreds here looking at all ages. If you want to look into this in more detail, here’s an overview of all the work done on motivated moral reasoning.

The point of all this

It seems that the debate surrounding illegally obtaining music won’t be solved through rational discussion unless people become aware of the underlying explanations for why they are making the moral judgements they are. The vast majority of human moral cognition is not rational, and is motivated by strong emotions and desires. People on either side of the debate will selectively use evidence to support their claims, and will distort the evidence of those opposing them. People whose livelihood depends on royalties will be more likely to condemn illegally obtaining music, and people whose livelihood does not depend on this and who can’t afford to pay for all the music they’d like to have will be more likely to defend illegally obtaining music. Each side will be motivated to confabulate explanations that defend their emotional desires.

This situation is not unique to music. Whether it’s stealing office supplies, finding money on the floor, or downloading a film, human moral cognition responds in highly emotional, desire motivated ways, frequently changing depending on the personal and social context. The sooner we move away from an assumption that people are moral reasoners and begin to understand that people are actually anything but rational when it comes to moral judgement then the sooner we will have a better understanding of what’s going on in this debate.

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