10/13/16

Living in the bubble Part III

When prophecy fails

Back in the 1950s, a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin became convinced she was in contact with aliens from the planet Clarion. They told her that the world would be destroyed in a great flood on December 21^st, 1954.

Gograph

She gathered around her a number of true believers who got rid of their possessions, left their spouses, and quit their jobs in anticipation of the end of the world. On the night in question, they convened at her house to await their midnight transportation to a flying saucer, which would save them from the deluge later that day.

Unknown to the group, their numbers included social psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues, who had secretly infiltrated the cult and joined them for their late night vigil.  Here’s what Festinger said happened as the clock ticked down:

•   December 20. The group expects a visitor from outer space to call upon them at midnight and to escort them to a waiting spacecraft. As instructed, the group goes to great lengths to remove all metallic items from their persons. As midnight approaches, zippers, bra straps, and other objects are discarded. The group waits.

•   12:05 am, December 21. No visitor. Someone in the group notices that another clock in the room shows 11:55. The group agrees that it is not yet midnight.

•   12:10 am. The second clock strikes midnight. Still no visitor. The group sits in stunned silence. The cataclysm itself is no more than seven hours away.

•   4:00 am. The group has been sitting in stunned silence. A few attempts at finding explanations have failed. Martin begins to cry.

•   4:45 am. Another message by automatic writing is sent to Martin. It states, in effect, that the God of Earth has decided to spare the planet from destruction. The cataclysm has been called off: "The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction." (Wikipedia)

Because of their public commitment to the apocalypse, because they had taken irrevocable steps to prepare for it, and because it didn’t happen, they were forced into cognitive dissonance, the brutal collision between belief and reality. Which they resolved by deciding that their prayers had changed God’s plan.

I think that something similar will happen at Trump HQ on Election Night, 2016.

Consider Trump and his Breitbart alt.right conspiracy clan.  As of this date, mid-October, they are still saying that Trump is ahead in the polls. He’s not, not even in the charmingly weird LA Times/USC poll. If the trend continues, they will lose in November and possibly lose big.  But they will never own it. They can’t. Like Martin’s doomsday cult, they have been too sure, too public in their insistence that they are right. Plus, Trump never owns any of his failures. Finally, many of Trump’s supporters have confined themselves to fringe sites that are giving them bad data. They will not see this coming.  

Unlike Martin's group, though, sweetness and light and heavenly mercy are probably not on their agenda. Instead, Trump (and campaign CEO Steve Bannon) will undoubtedly blame it on some elitist global conspiracy or on Paul Ryan or, my bet, on massive voter fraud.  And it will get uglier from there.

That’s my own doomsday prediction.

ETA: My cousin Michael believes that Trump's ultimate plan is to set up his own TV network or cable channel and rake in more millions by milking the angst of his frustrated followers. Stay tuned.

10/12/16

Just for fun:

The Lemon Juice Bandit

“In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. "But I wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras.” If it worked for invisible writing, then surely it must make his face invisible as well, right?

Fascinated by the story, psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning developed the notion that the less you know about how the world works, the more sure you are of your competence. 

Since the mid 1990s, their theory has been tested over a wide variety of tasks: humor, grammar, logic, geography, financial knowledge, biology and so on. The results hold. People who don’t know much think they know a lot. That’s because they don’t know what they don’t know. People who know a lot underestimate how much they know because they know how complicated things are.

Make of this what you will.

Here’s the original study.

10/11/16

Living in the bubble Part II

The Donald Trump Meltdown

I’ve spent the morning trying to get inside Donald Trump’s head to see if I can make sense of the last 24 hours.  To do that I’ve kept two things in mind:  Trump is a narcissist, and his actions are fueled by anger.*

What we know about narcissists:

Everything they know is colored by egoism – in other words, it’s all about them. Everything. Always.

Specifically:

Narcissists are grandiose: they exaggerate their skills and achievements and expect everyone to recognize them as superior. (“I know more about ISIS than the generals.”)
They are preoccupied with fantasies of their unlimited success and brilliance and power.
They believe they are unique.
They require excessive admiration
They have a strong sense of entitlement
They regularly show arrogant or haughty behavior.

Trump has said that he won Sunday’s debate by a landslide AND he feels that his comments about grabbing women are irrelevant locker room talk.  Not important. Given that, a person like this would be have difficulty understanding why the RNC and Paul Ryan and others would repudiate him. They must be scum.

Not only is Paul Ryan disloyal, but the rest of Congress went wild at this. Because they all support Trump. Because he’s great.

Here he declares war on the Republican Party. That’s anger again at their betrayal.  It’s self-defeating because Trump has little ground game except for what he can piggy-back on the RNC. Here in Nevada, those folks will be going door to door for the GOP and saying, what?
“Hi.  Support Joe Heck for Senate and Donald Trump for President, even though Joe Heck has disavowed Donald Trump.”?

 

More anger.

And more grandiosity.  He knows more about winning elections than conventional politicians. Of course, he has some good reasons to believe this – conventional politicians lost to him in the primaries.

The next three weeks are going to be really interesting! Where’s that popcorn?

giphy.com

ETA: I just caught Trump's comments about Teddy Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. Really?  I got nothin’. Not a clue.

*The Goldwater rule says that psychiatrists shouldn’t analyze people they haven’t actually met. I’m not a psychiatrist and anyway, I’m retired. :-)

10/6/16

Living in the bubble

Part I

I watched Donald Trump today practicing his town hall skills. He was going through some recent polls that were very favorable to his candidacy.  While he was doing that, I was comparing what he was saying to what Nate Silver was saying over at FiveThirtyEight and wondering what the Trump folks were smoking.

And then I remembered. 

There’s a really excellent three-part documentary on entertainer Clay Aiken’s unsuccessful run for Congress in North Carolina’s extremely Republican 2^nd district. In The Runner-Up, he talks, as others have, about living in the bubble. He says people would come up to him and say they were voting for him. He ran some polls that showed him getting closer to incumbent Renee Elmers. People around him were encouraging and supportive. And then on election night, the bubble burst when he lost by 17 percentage points. What he thought and hoped and experienced ran smack into reality.

An even better example was caught on FOX News on Election Day, 2012.  Karl Rove had been convinced that Romney would win. Had to win.  Other FOX pundits also predicted Republican success, some by a landslide.  When it didn’t happen, Rove couldn’t believe it.  Here’s what the video looked like on FOX News.

It’s a great example of cognitive dissonance, which occurs when what we believe comes crashing into what is real. It’s painful and distressing and almost never this public. What led Rove and the others astray is the confirmation bias, a human tendency to seek out and remember information that confirms ideas we already have. That puts them in a bubble. When confronted with contradictory evidence, we suffer from cognitive dissonance . That leads us to try very hard to explain away reality or to search for new data that confirms our beliefs. It’s no surprise, then, that there’s a sizable fraction of the GOP who believes that Obama’s election was the result of massive voter fraud.  That’s an easier resolution to the dissonance than the notion that so many other American’s disagreed with them. Not when everyone they knew and everything they saw in their carefully selected media believed that Romney would win.

Don't get me wrong: This is not a Republican thing; it’s a human thing.  Contradictory evidence is very uncomfortable, but living with it brings us closer to the reality in our lives.

10/4/16
Why’d he do that?

There’s a new movie coming out shortly called “Tower”, about the day in 1966 that Charles Whitman climbed the watch tower at the University of Texas and started shooting. Here’s the trailer:

With its 100% critics' rating from Rotten Tomatoes, the film just moved to the top of my Must See list.

School shootings have tragically become almost commonplace, but back on that hot August day 50 years ago, no one knew what was happening. I am obsessed by the Texas event for two reasons.  First, because it illustrates so clearly what Freud called overdetermination, the notion that human behavior (including political behavior) almost always has more than one cause. And second because it provides some lovely examples of heroism. More on that second part in a later blog. Probably after the election. When we’ll need it.

The movie is about the victims and deals very little with Whitman. That’s excellent, as we have in the past put too much emphasis on the evil doer.  However, for the purposes of this blog, Mr. Whitman is front and center. 

In the weeks leading up to the shootings, Whitman had become concerned about the growing intensity of his violent impulses.  So much so that he wrote this note before climbing the tower

“I don't quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I don't really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can't recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks.

<SNIP>

"After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had some tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottles of Excedrin in the past three months.

<SNIP>

"If my life insurance policy is valid, please see that all the worthless checks I wrote this weekend are made good. Please pay off my debts. I am 25 years old and have been financially independent.

"Donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation. Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of this type.”

During Whitman's autopsy, the medical examiner found a brain tumor about the size of a pecan in an area that could have pressed against the amygdala. As you may know from one of my previous blogs, the amygdala is a part of the brain that’s involved in social dominance and aggressive behavior, among other things.  Back in 1966, the investigators weren’t sure whether this tumor was relevant to his behavior or not. Fifty years later, I think it probably is.

Fear and rage reactions have been triggered in human subjects following electrical stimulation of the amygdala.  One study describes a female patient who became irritable and angry, and then enraged. Her lips retracted, there was extreme facial grimacing, threatening behavior, and then rage and attack--all of which persisted well beyond stimulus termination. Follow-up studies over the years have found the same thing.

But would a tumor in this area be enough to account for his behavior? Probably not. I think it was a necessary condition but not sufficient by itself. So what else?

This was Texas in the 60s. Then and now, firearms and ammunition were easy to obtain. Whitman was a vet with time in the Marines, where he earned a sharpshooter rating with emphasis on shooting rapidly over long distances and aiming at moving targets. So he knew how to shoot and was easily able to get the rifles and ammunition he used.

His father had been physically and psychologically abusive. His mother had left his dad and moved in with Whitman. Before he climbed the tower he shot and killed her and his wife.

He was an Eagle Scout and an altar boy and a smart kid, but he also had uncontrollable rages mediated by a brain tumor, combined with a history of abuse, sharpshooter skills and easy access to weapons. 

In other words, overdetermined.