2/2/17

The upside to aging.

One of the perks of being a college professor is that textbook publishers send you tons of free books for review, whether you ask for them or not.  This has given rise to a cottage industry of people who will then buy the books you aren't using.  I found this a bit of a moral morass, as this aftermarket eats into publishers' profits,  until I happened on a solution: I kept the cash the buyers gave me in an envelope in my desk.  If a student came in and had some kind of financial crisis, as they often did, I was always able to help.

But I digress.

One of those books was a text on the psychology of aging.  I was in my mid 50s at the time, so I read it.  Wow!  Talk about depressing!  It was pretty much a litany of the cognitive (thinking) systems that would fade and eventually fail as time went by.  Bummer.

So I sold it at the first opportunity and tried very hard not to think about growing old.

But today a ray of sunshine arrived in my inbox in the form of an article from the Observer, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science.  Titled “The Cognitive Upside of Aging”, it laid out some of the things that got better with age, even into our 60s and 70s.

Psychologists found that certain abilities “peak” at certain ages and then gradually decline.  For example, information processing speed peaked at around 18-20. However, vocabulary, math, general knowledge, and verbal comprehension didn’t peak until much later in life. Vocabulary, especially, didn’t really seem to have a peak. Older adults were also better at reading emotional situations than their younger counterparts, an advantage that lasted well into their 60s. In fact, their brains also promote more emotional stability as they age.

Sustained attention also improves with age.  We geezers are much better at staying focused on a task than the younger folks.  That sustained attention is really important.  It helps us stay on tasks that involve learning, perception and memory.  Plus lapses in attention can lead to difficulties at work or increase risk of car accidents.  

Another set of studies found that while younger participants had faster reaction times, older participants were more thoughtful and cautious.

Finally, they found that older people who are in good health are generally upbeat about the world. People in their 20s are also pretty happy.  That level deteriorates over time, and they don’t regain the same level of happiness until they’re in their 60s or 70s, so hang in there!

In general, their conclusion was “At any given age, you’re getting better at some things, you’re getting worse at some other things, and you’re at a plateau at some other things…There’s probably not one age at which you peak on most things, much less all of them.”

So good news!  You’ll probably become happier as you age and more emotionally stable, better able to read situations, and dynamite at Scrabble and crossword puzzles.

Carry on.

1/25/17

Does size really matter?

Back in the 1950s, social psychologist Solomon Asch asked a bunch of Swarthmore students a simple question: Which of the three lines on the right is the same length as the line on the left?

Under ordinary conditions, almost everyone got the right answer.  But Asch wasn’t interested in ordinary conditions; he was interested in conformity.  So in an alternate condition, he set up the room like this:

Six of those seven men were stooges who’d been primed in advance.  Answering out loud, each gave the same, obviously wrong choice.  The seventh man was then asked his opinion.  Would he conform and select an answer he KNEW was wrong to go along with the crowd? Or would he remain strong and independent?  As Asch had predicted, a third (32%) of his subjects gave the conforming answer rather than disagree with the crowd.  A third. 

Yesterday, The Washington Post published the results of a little study of their own. LINK

"On Sunday and Monday, we surveyed 1,388 American adults. We showed half of them a crowd picture from each inauguration (see below) and asked which was from Trump’s inauguration and which was from Obama’s. As you might expect, 40% of the Trump voters gave the wrong answer compared to 8% of Clinton voters. "  

Then the Post asked the other half of their sample, “Which picture has more people?”  Got that? Which picture has more people?  15% of Trump voters said the picture on the left had more people compared to 2% of Clinton voters. Fifteen percent denied the evidence right before their eyes. Shades of Solomon Asch.

The Post concluded that people probably didn’t actually believe their wrong answer but were compelled to make it to keep their behavior in line with their belief in Trump.  While I agree that these Trump voters had skin in the game and answered in a way that aligned with their previous beliefs, I also think that conformity was in play.  

Keep in mind that Clinton voters are not immune from this. However, research has found that conservatives conform more than moderates who conform more than liberals. For example, this study was conceptually similar to Asch’s but used a word task rather than a visual task. 

So what does this mean for the future?  I predict that when Trump’s investigation of alleged voter fraud finds only small, unsystematic results, a chunk of Trump voters won’t believe it.  They can’t, because it would mean their guy was lying when he said he won the popular vote.  

It also means that this same chunk will continue to deny the evidence of their own eyes and good sense if it contradicts their strongly held beliefs. 

 

cartoon stock.com

1/14/17

How the dollar got its face.

The U.S. Mint has just announced a new series of $100 gold coins to be struck with various images of Lady Liberty. The first one, due out in April, shows Liberty as an African American woman with hair in braids and a crown of stars. She's gorgeous.

$100 Gold Piece

But as you can imagine, not everyone is thrilled.  The Twitter outrage came from both the right and the left.  Lady Liberty is white, dammit!

Actually, she's not. There's a long tradition of putting Native Americans on our coins. Some of them are even men.  You probably know a few of these...

But when it all started, Lady Liberty was the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.

Seriously.

At the time of the American Revolution, there wasn't a great deal of British coinage available, so the colonies supplemented their currency with things like the Maria Theresa Austrian taler and the Spanish real de a echo or Spanish dollar. The Spanish dollar, whose name was derived from the Austrian coin, was worth eight reales  and gave us the piratical term, "pieces of eight".  Here's what it looked like.

Real de a ocho

The taler got a lot of mileage in Europe and elsewhere and was recognized as legal tender long after the Empress died.  In fact, the date of her death, 1780, remained on the coin until its final demise in 1961.  It was a very popular coin!  You can still buy them from the Austrian mint, but they're no longer legal currency.

Maria Theresa Taler

When the new American republic began to design coins, they looked no further than the popular taler for their design. And there's old Maria Theresa, sitting on our earliest coinage, Hapsburg nose and all.  This is a one cent piece from 1792, the first year the new country minted coins.

One Cent Piece

Below is a 1796 dollar.  The design is already evolving, but the draped bust remains identical to the taler.

Silver Dollar

So Lady Liberty started out as an autocratic European empress and has evolved over the years to reflect changing tastes and artistic impressions, including a fair number as a Native American.  The new $100 gold coin is just another step in that evolution, but in this case a return to one that more reflects American history.  I look forward to the Hispanic and Indian designs. Can a transgender Lady Liberty be far behind?