Infant Morality

Recent research in child psychology provides new insight into the development of moral judgments. The proximity to the topic of ethics reminds me of how discussions in college philosophy classes very frequently turned to the subject of child psychology at one time or another. The results of the new research raise a variety of questions in my mind.

The study, by Kiley Hamlin of the University of British Columbia, showed babies of five and eight months old a series of videos, in which one puppet either helped or hindered another in a task, and later either had a toy returned to or taken from it by a third puppet. Three quarters of five month old children preferred the third puppet to return the toy no matter what, but eight month olds gave preference to the giver or taker depending on the earlier actions of the puppet from whom it was giving or taking.

The conclusion that has been drawn from this is that between those ages, children learn to determine whether a person deserves good or bad outcomes. That is, they have developed a sense of justice, and see value in rewards and punishments in addition to just straightforward good and bad. University College London child psychologist Uta Frith is quoted in the coverage of this research as saying: “To me this says that toddlers already have more or less adult moral understanding. Isn’t this amazing? I don’t know in what way adults would react in the same situation in a more sophisticated way.”

She may be right that toddlers possess adult moral understanding, but I would add that that doesn’t necessarily say anything good about toddlers; it says something terrible about adults. I also reflects badly on the persons conducting the research, or at least those commenting on it, who seem to be entirely too cavalier about the accuracy of intuitive moral judgments. Although reward and punishment are sensible moral concepts, it seems to me that by lauding eight month olds for having a natural inclination towards tit-for-tat ethics actually contradicts one of the noble axioms we end up teaching them later: two wrongs don’t make a right.

It strikes that based on the description of the experiment, and the accompanying videos of the puppets, the child participants have no reason to believe that the giver and taker puppets actually witnessed the helping or hindering actions of the other puppets. If that’s so, they aren’t judging the appropriateness of specific acts of reward or punishment; rather, they are projecting a sense of justice, from their own points of view, onto independent events. That doesn’t strike me as morally sound. It seems quite subjective, and it may be worth noting that in the experiments this natural subjectivity is coming from someone who has not yet developed an independent sense of self.

I wonder whether it has struck the original researchers that these observations may imply a groundwork for the development of religious concepts in the human mind. Given that the children are not judging the appropriateness of direct reward and punishment from the person who has been harmed or hindered, the justice that is being dispensed turns out to be a sort of cosmic justice. That is, if a child continues to think that good and bad outcomes are deserved or undeserved regardless of their actual connection to prior good deeds or wrongdoing, there comes a certain point at which a sophisticated intelligence needs to give some account of how punishment can work without human intention. Notions like God and karma fit the bill.

So eight month olds and twenty-eight year olds alike might be inclined to think well of unprovoked acts of aggression if their victims have formerly showed themselves to be assholes, because the act is justified from their own limited point of view. That is, many adults may indeed fail to “react in the same situation in a more sophisticated way.” But I certainly think they ought to do better. Adults, who have had some time to reflect on the tremendous nuance of ethical calculations, should be capable of making moral judgments from an objective point of view.

It disturbs me to think that natural human development leads one to consequentialism, because I don’t think that’s the correct conclusion. Rather, acts are good or bad in and of themselves, not based on their outcomes or whether their objects are deserving. You can either give the ball back to the puppet that dropped it, or you can take it from him. Stealing is no more or less wrong if the puppet had been a jerk beforehand. Interestingly, that is apparently the way the five month olds in the study see things. So in my view infant morality may be preferable to toddler morality.

Before this, I thought that deontology and consequentialism were competing on a fairly level playing field. Now I see that the deck may be stacked against my favored category of ethical theory, in that promoting deontology requires overriding aspects of human nature. That makes for a challenging breaking point.

Of course, the results of this research were not unanimous for all participants, and some demonstrated different preferences. That leads me to wonder whether those children that preferred a puppet who returned toys even to bad puppets will naturally grow up to be adults like me, who believe that the rightness or wrongness of an act is unaffected by its surrounding context. Perhaps there is an evolutionary trait that appears in the development of a minority of children and leads them to make ostensibly moral judgments that are quite different from what these researchers conclude is normal and assert is accurate.

But the fact remains that the vast majority of children evidently grow into a natural belief that right and wrong are subjective and context-dependent. And the further fact remains that I believe that’s false and unethical. Thus, my view is that in a philosophically and morally sophisticated society, some natural consequences of child development, such as the impulse to cheer on the misfortune of those who have caused misfortune, need to be overridden later in life.

The Simplest Explanation is Often the Tesh One

During a recent, lengthy conversation with my brother Brian, he brought up the John Tesh radio show so that we could badmouth the host’s daily contributions to the lives of his listeners. I don’t think all that badly of John Tesh, but the sentiment that my brother and I seem to share is that he takes a rather unquestioning attitude towards the information that he cites on his program, and tends to dispense, as if it is gospel, advice that needs to be context-dependent at best. Then again, sometimes it’s probably just wrong altogether.

Yesterday, I just happened to hear a bit of the John Tesh broadcast, and really got my dander up over his latest explanation of some academic study. To his credit, I’m sure that a lot of the fault lies with the researchers who are putting out this material in the first place, but again, it is Tesh’s unquestioning attitude in broadcasting the stuff that turns irresponsible reasoning from an academic footnote into a corruption of popular knowledge.

In this case, Tesh thought himself to be informing his audience that cultural and artistic activities improve people’s health. According to surveys of study participants in Norway, he says, those who reported going to museums on a regular basis or either participating in or watching things like ballet tended to be significantly healthier overall than people who didn’t take part in those activities.

And then, setting aside any possible questions as to the meaning of the data, Tesh asks what he apparently thinks is the only natural question: how does this work? He promptly answers his own question, apparently restating the opinions of the original researchers. Not knowing where to find the original reporting, I can’t say with certainty that that’s the case, but coverage of the story in the UK Daily Telegraph back in May made the same statements about a unidirectional, causal relationship between cultural activity and physical outcome, so that suggests that such statements are repetition of the claims of the researchers. Whatever their original language, Tesh puts it simply and stupidly: cultural activities engage us mentally, and that helps us to be able to deal with stress and keeps us healthier.

It is absolutely shocking to me that professional academics and paid researchers still sometimes use the most obvious kind of faulty reasoning and confuse correlation with causality. Observing that healthy people go to museums absolutely does not mean that going to museums makes people healthy. In fact, assuming that that’s the case strikes me as amazingly unimaginative and intellectually lazy. I recognize that one needs a hypothesis in order to make scientific progress, but in general I’d say that good advice for researchers would be unless you have a damn good scientific explanation for how two phenomena are linked, don’t guess. As near as I can tell, everyone who’s communicating the story of this culture-health connection, from the Nordic researchers to the staff of the Telegraph to John Tesh, is taking it for granted in exactly the same way. Do none of them consider that there might be other factors at play?

It’s not difficult to identify alternative explanations. Of course, any of them would need additional data in order to have sufficient support, just as the claim that cultural activities cause good health needs additional data as to exactly what the mechanism of that cause is. Without access to a university research staff or other such resources, I can only guess, but I’d be quite willing to bet that if you did a study of people’s social class as compared with their cultural engagement, you’d find that wealthier people participated in more activities.

Take the three data sets together, and you’ve got a picture of more affluent people who are healthier than poor people and go to museums more often. I don’t know what John Tesh or the Daily Telegraph would say, but I have a fairly clear sense of which of those is the more significant variable in determining the other two. And yet I still wouldn’t say that being rich makes you healthier, because that’s a stupid thing to say. What I would say is that being wealthy gives you greater access to a wide range of food options, and allows you to pay for health-enhancing luxuries like gym memberships and spa vacations, while still having enough left over to go to the opera. So being wealthy makes it easier to make both healthier and more culturally refined lifestyle choices. But unless someone gives me a thoroughly refined scientific explanation of newly discovered physical mechanisms, I’m fairly certain that the only things that have a direct impact on health are the things that interact with your body’s functioning, such as what you eat and how often you exercise.

Since the British newspapers covered this study, Britain’s National Health Service took it up and posted a thorough, reasonable discussion of it on their website, including the prominent image caption at the top of the page, “It’s hard to tell if culture affects health, or vice versa.” It also adds tremendously to my sense of frustration at this sort of study by pointing out that surveys of participants wasn’t only used to determine their level of cultural participation; the surveys were actually the gauges of participant health. Their actual health, as determined by medical indicators, remains completely unknown.

In the NHS’s conclusion, it reiterates that the direction of causality is difficult to determine, and adds:

For example, just as participating in cultural activities might cause people to report better physical and mental health, it is just as plausible that people who feel healthier were more likely to engage in cultural activities.

No kidding. All a person should have to do to come up with this alternative explanation for the data is to think for just one minute about their own experience. Surely even John Tesh has felt down in the dumps at one or two points in his life. I’d be surprised if he reported that he was especially well-traveled among his local cultural institutions during those periods.

For that matter, the curve for this study would be absolutely shattered by interviewing just a few people who are genuinely sick. The researchers did adjust for things like chronic disease, but presumably not for recent, persistent disease. If, say, you’ve gotten the flu in each season of this year and have been laid up in bed for weeks at a time, of course you’re not going to the symphony. But if the poll was worded with sufficient vagueness, anyone who was reviewing the data blind would just see that participant x reported being in somewhat poor health and was highly unlikely to go to the cinema, theater, or gallery. Such a researcher might easily conclude that participant x’s cultural disinterest was contributing negatively to his health, if that researcher didn’t think very hard about the different ways to interpret what he was reading.

The study also analyzed reports of satisfaction with life, anxiety, and depression, and found that particular activities, depending on the gender of the participant, were correlated to differing levels of each. I take it that the essential conclusion from this part of the research is “Doing stuff makes you feel better.” You don’t say! And yet here also, to claim a unidirectional relationship is to draw an illogical, indefensible, and irresponsible conclusion, because feeling better makes you do stuff, too.

It’s the irresponsibility of this kind of reporting that really drives me crazy and prompts me to write 1,500 word rants on the topic. And that is also why I focus my umbrage on John Tesh, because it’s his sort of highly digested, exceptionally simplistic, and frequently repeated iterations of this kind of terrible academic research that are especially poisonous. One-dimensional interpretations of correlation between behaviors and conditions send a clear message of blame to people experiencing the less favorable conditions.

I imagine John Tesh rhetorically asking his audience “worried about your health?” and then cheerfully explaining to them that “if you think the problem is that you don’t have insurance or you can’t afford anything but empty calories at the grocery store, you’re wrong! It turns out that you, listener, just fucked up by not attending enough literature readings.”

Sadly, I’m sure that John Tesh genuinely feels as though he’s helping out his audience by telling them about the little aspects of their day-to-day lives that can contribute to their lasting health. But the thing is that for those of them who really have to struggle with these issues, he’s just making it worse. Considering that that Nordic research group included anxiety as a factor in its calculations, you’d think that someone would have given some thought to the likely future effect of believing that your health is tied to the number of lectures you attend this year. If people of distinctly low socioeconomic class listen to Tesh on this one and come to believe that frequent participation in cultural activities is key to their physical and mental health, the actual effect may turn out to be the opposite of what Tesh intends. I say that based on experience; I know what severe anxiety can come of trying to be culturally engaged while knowing all along that you cannot actually afford it.

If this possible ill effect was the consequence of just some one-off comment from John Tesh, I could give him a pass, but from what I’ve heard of his show, this is part and parcel of his daily broadcast. The list of recent topics on his website at this moment includes “Loneliness is bad for your health,” and “Volunteering boosts your health.” Bullshit claims, both. There is almost no conceivable way that in either of those cases the two factors being linked aren’t just simultaneous effects of other causes. Yet somehow Tesh doesn’t know that. Tragically, the researchers who produced the original claims may not. And certainly, much of Tesh’s listenership doesn’t realize that, and will take the voice on the radio at its word.

And what will come of these claims? Well, sure, certain frequent volunteers will feel more confident that their next check-up is going to go just fine. But also, some people who don’t have the time to volunteer because they’re working three jobs and still can’t afford health insurance will have found a new source of stress, anxiety, and depression, while some of those who have the best health care money can buy will attribute its effects to that Thanksgiving they spent working at the soup kitchen downtown. And at the same time, John Tesh is telling his sick and lonely listeners that if they’re worried about their health they’d better make sure they aren’t lonely, and if they’re worried about their loneliness, they damn well should be because it’s going to keep them in poor health. That information is rather less than helpful unless you’re neither lonely nor afflicted.

But the simpler the explanations of everyone’s problems, the better it is for everyone who doesn’t suffer them.

Killing Not Just Newspapers, But News

Nielsen released its report yesterday on how Americans spend their time online, and most of the extensive media coverage seems to be focusing on how popular their research shows Facebook to be. Apparently there was some doubt about that prior to yesterday. This study tells a much larger story than that, however. Focusing on the social media aspect of it seems like a strange bit of rhetoric, and an impulse to exploit the angle that news outlets assume will generate the most attention. Social media and blogs together comprised almost a quarter of people’s time spent online, but it was not the largest category. That remains the miscellaneous category, but let’s not pull punches here, it’s porn. The smallest share of time online goes to news, at 2.6 percent.

That’s a significant piece of information at a time when the internet is said to be killing newspapers, with even television media having a difficult time keeping up with changing landscape. But if society as a whole is devoting only one fortieth of its time spent online to learning about current events, I wonder if that calls into question the assumption that traditional news media are failing because of competition from convenient, cheap, high volume online sources of news. Other analyses have indicated that overall readership of established news agencies is in decline, not just readership of their print formats. It seems that it has always been assumed that this readership was dispersing to other sources from which they gathered the same volume of information that they used to consume, but I expect that that would be difficult to prove empirically. To me, these new numbers support an alternative interpretation: that people are opting out of information-gathering altogether, and that established news media are losing ground not to competition, but to distraction.

The existing narrative reflects what I think is an unfortunate and all too common perspective that all change is positive change. Letting that perspective go unquestioned allows us to sacrifice the best of what is currently available to us, either because the best of what is emerging is thought to outweigh it or because preserving anything against the onslaught of social or technological change is deemed a lost cause. The optimistic outlook on current trends in news consumption is evidently that there is a greater volume of reporting, a greater diversity of opinion, and a greater ease of access. That’s hardly all there is to the story, though. A greater volume of reporting doesn’t mean much if the sources of that reporting are devoid of the resources that might otherwise encourage a fuller investigation and a higher quality of reporting. A greater diversity of opinion is hardly progress if it reflects a devaluing of objectivity and a tendency of people to choose the sources of their news based on a preexisting agreement with the outlet’s perspective. Greater ease of access is barely significant if fewer people are choosing to access the most significant information that is available to them.

Of course, I don’t know that any of these trends are truly dominant. I am confident, however, that there is far too much optimistic assumption about the character of American audiences, and far too much dismissiveness and acceptance of powerlessness among those who might be in a position to affect positive change in consumer behavior. Much of the media seems content to fawn over social networking sites, curve their reporting on topics of much broader significance around a sense of awe at their popularity, wrongly declare them to be the drivers of foreign revolutions, and so on. The cultural position of Facebook, Twitter and the like is crucially important, but I would love to see a lot more analysis of its causes and effects, and a basic willingness to criticize and resist.

As far as I’m concerned, the story to be taken away from the Nielsen report is not that Facebook holds irreversible cultural dominance, but that an enormous portion of the American public enjoys masturbation in its multitudinous forms, and hates information and critical thinking. And as much as that drives frivolous use of social media and a resistance to hard news, it also may inform the existing news media’s response to such trends, so that their diminished quality and misplaced emphasis drives nails into their own coffins.