The Mystery of Change

I truly cannot understand the language of my former heart. Who was that person?
Zadie Smith

Earlier this month (12/17/12) the New Yorker published an essay by Zadie Smith titled, “Notes on Attunement.” It took me a while to figure out what she meant by “attunement.” It’s not a widely used word. In fact, it’s not in most dictionaries.

But what she meant was that there was a time, early in her youth, when she couldn’t stand the music of Joni Mitchell. In other words, she wasn’t in tune with her songs. Instead, she loved songs that made her, dance, laugh, or cry. Joni’s did none of that. To Smith, her songs were just noise.

Her friends asked her: “You don’t like Joni? My friends had pity in their eyes.”

But then after many years, she finally began to appreciate her songs, to come to love them, in fact. Then she asks a question I wish I heard more often.

“How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably? How does such change occur?”

Her question gets to the heart of how major shifts in behavior occur and what that implies about a person’s identity. Her transformation came unexpectedly, it wasn’t gradual, or develop as her musical appreciation matured. Smith writes:

“Involving no progressive change but, instead, a leap of faith [the pleasure that Joni Mitchell’s songs now gave her]. A sudden, unexpected attunement. Or a returning from nothing, or from a negative, into something soaring and positive and sublime.”

Today the effect of listening to Joni Mitchell brings her to tears, uncontrollable tears. She says it’s embarrassing and she can’t listen to her songs when others are present. But they bring her a sense of joy, of “almost intolerable beauty.” “I hated Joni Mitchell—and then I loved her. Her voice did nothing for me—until the day it undid me.”

On my understanding many major shifts in behavior happen this way. They simply occur over time, without any external pressure or the influence of another person. Sometimes they occur after a major change in one’s life or a “progressive change in taste,” but I don’t sense that either of these factors played a role in Smith’s feelings about Joni Mitchell’s tunes.

What does her observation suggest about a person’s identity? Smith writes, “The girl who hated Joni and the woman who loves her seem to me similarly divorced from each other, two people who happen to have shared the same body.”

Again, I think that is a common observation. I know, for example, that I sometimes wonder how I ever managed to teach psychology or write those articles on issues that seem so foreign to me now. I say to myself that must be another person. It isn’t the me who is the me of today. The discontinuity of the life I lead today and the one I led after I left graduate school is striking.

Many have written about the multiple selves people often have. Perhaps that’s all it is. We are two or three selves at any time in our life, often in opposition or inconsistent with one another, and yet, we occupy the same physical body, maybe a few more wrinkles here and there, a few gray stands of hair, sometimes lighter, sometimes heavier, but we generally look the same so that the friends we had in college recognize us when we see each other at our 50th reunion.

Towards the end Smith writes: “What created this easy transit in the first place is a mystery: I feel I listened to as many songs in childhood as I read stories, but in music I seem to have formed rigid ideas and created defenses around them, whereas when it came to words I never did.”

Le Big Mac

There were several accounts on the Web last week about New York City’s new law on posting calorie counts in restaurant chains. A study tracked food choices at four fast-food chains—McDonalds, Wendy’s Burger King and Kentucky Friend Chicken—where customers were informed or the calorie content of food items.

The outcome of the study should not be surprising to anyone familiar with the long line of previous field studies of the effects on information on modifying behavior. Research as far back as the energy crisis of the 70s and 80s demonstrated over and over again that posting requests to save energy or informing people of their actual consumption with and without cost feedback did not turn them into energy conservers. Still we continue to rely on information techniques in trying to regulate or change behavior

Evidence from the recent study in New York found that about half the customers noticed the posted calories associated with particular items of food. About a quarter (28%) of those who noticed claimed the information had influenced what they ordered while almost 90% said it had led them to make less caloric choices

But when the investigators analyzed the receipts (during a four week test period), they found that slightly more calories were ordered than the subjects in the control condition that measured customer choices (during a two week baseline period) before the law went into effect—a common control condition in field studies.

The research was carried out in what were said to be “poor neighborhoods” where there are high rates of obesity. “One advocate of calorie posting suggested that low-income people were more interested in price than in calories.” I laughed when I read this knowing full well that while those more financially endowed are probably less concerned about price, they are just as likely as anyone else to ignore the information and let their taste buds or food preferences govern their choices.

Since information approaches are not costly and can be easily implemented, the more central issue is how to make them more effective. Simply posting information or passing out a leaflet doesn’t guarantee by any means that it will be translated into action. Several suggestions have been made on how to overcome this limitation.

• Vivid and highly concrete information should be employed. Instead of posting caloric values, show a symbol of a clogged artery.

• Take account of the motivation of the target population. If you are working in an area where price is important, offer an incentive, say a free burger for every nine ordered, as many coffee shops do for coffee purchases.

• Emphasize the trustworthiness of the message. Pair the information with respectable physician, hospital of government agency rather than McDonald’s or Burger King

• Make the information as personal as possible. Instead of posting the caloric information, arrange to have the manager hand out a colorful card with the same information to each patron with a few words of encouragement.

• Tailor the message to the target population of clients. Again, is price is crucial to the group, make sure to emphasize the incentives for choosing “healthy” items that will lead less costly future purchases, to say nothing future medical expenses.

Noon. Hunger the only thing
singing in my belly.
I walk through the blossoming cherry trees
on the library mall,
past the young couples coupling,
by the crazy fanatic
screaming doom and salvation
at a sensation-hungry crowd,
to the Lake Street McDonald's.
It is crowded, the lines long and sluggish.
I wait in the greasy air.
All around me people are eating—
the sizzle of conversation,
the salty odor of sweat,
the warm flesh pressing out of
hip huggers and halter tops...

The rest of the poem appears at http://poemhunter.blogspot.com/2007/05/you-cant-write-poem-about-mcdonalds.html

Changed By Literature

When someone says it was literature or a great book that changed their life, we remain pretty much in the dark about how, in fact, that happened. Tobias Wolff wrote:

“I was changed by literature, not by cautionary or exhortatory literature, but by the truth as I found it in literature. I recognize the world in a different way because of it, and I continue to be influenced in that way by it. Opened up, made more alert, and called to a greater truthfulness in my own accounting of things, not just in my writing, in my life as well. It did that for me, and does that for me, and no one touched by it in this way should have any doubt of its necessity.”

One might wonder in what way literature came to have such a significant impact on Wolff? Did he take a course from in college from a superb teacher? Or did his parents read Tolstoy to one another at night? Or did he simply come to literature on his own, gradually, over time? Knowing something about what led up to this change might suggest something more general about the conditions that give rise to a reader or writer.

I chanced upon the answer to these questions in an essay, A Brother’s Story, he wrote for the recently published Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry. He writes about a visit he and his older brother Geoffrey, made to their father’s home in La Jolla one memorable summer. His brother had just graduated from Princeton and had been offered an enviable teaching position in Istanbul. They hadn’t seen their father in over seven years. But just before they arrived, their father had suffered a complete breakdown and had been taken by his fiancé to a sanitarium.

What does Geoffrey do? Does he send Tobias back to Washington State and turn around to return east? What he does is first find a job, then buy a car and find the two of them another apartment as their father had been evicted from the one he occupied for failing to pay the rent.

Then Wolff says, Geoffrey assigned him a rather rigorous schedule of reading and writing. He told him to write an essay on an assigned text every three or four days. The readings were all new to him—Greek plays, works by Camus, novels by Fitzgerald and Faulkner, etc. Wolff writes,

“Those few months changed me….until that summer I’d never known anyone who lived for ideas and words; to whom writing, his own and others’ was not a diversion from life but an imperative form of life….after that summer I never really wanted to be anything else. Week after week of breathing the incense of respect for sentences and stories helped bring me to the judgment, right or wrong, that there was no better way to spend my life than in making them.”

So it was that unexpected turn of events the summer he spent with his brother that helped Wolff see his way to becoming a writer. He says he was “damned lucky.” And he learned that, “I had a brother who would act against his own immediate interest on my behalf, not just on impulse but day after day.” He concludes, “The good luck of having a brother is partly the luck of having stories to tell.”

I too have had the good luck of knowing another person who showed me a better way to spend my life. I think that is the way it often happens to individuals who come to love literature and the writing life or the pleasures to be found in a life of learning. In my case, it wasn’t my brother, but rather a teacher I had in college and his extraordinary class on Plato that started me down the path to also becoming one. Alas, that is another story.

Advice Is Like Snow

When you found someone who was tremendously appealing but not quite perfect, you might believe you could change them after marriage, not everything, just a few things, but in truth the most you could expect to change perhaps one thing and even that would eventually go back to what it had been. James Salter

Who has not attempted to mold their partner into the person they might wish them to be? Or at least, chip away at the edges of their character? People think they can change their partner or other people in general, but the long and dismal record of human relationships makes it abundantly clear that it is not going to happen.

It does, however, in Neil LaBute’s drama and later movie, The Shape of Things. A young graduate student of art virtually refashions the person of her lover. She induces him to lose weight, get rid of his glasses in favor of contacts, change his hairstyle, wear hip clothing, and straighten his nose. At her instigation, he becomes a work of art, a “human sculpture” which takes her eighteen months to create for her graduate thesis project.

She says, “it was “a simple matter of can i instill “x” amount of change in this creature, using only manipulation as my palette knife? i made sure that nothing was ever forced during our sessions or ‘sittings’ together…and that his free will was always at the forefront of each decision. i coaxed, made suggestions, created the illusion of interest and desire, but never said, ‘please do this.”

While the student shows considerable insight about manipulating behavior, one can take some consolation in knowing that life doesn’t imitate art quite so readily. Her insight is to recognize that forceful attempts to change a partner’s behavior usually backfire and serve only to elicit resistance and disagreements. Her approach is much more subtle--she makes no demands and applies little pressure. She knows that when partners feel they are understood and accepted, they are more likely to change willingly.

Indeed, her method is not unlike that of a highly successful marital therapy known as “integrative couples therapy.” As Christensen and Jacobs, the developers of this approach, put it: “The natural inclination is to try to change your partner, but efforts directed solely at such change often makes the conflict worse. When you genuinely accept your partner, you may achieve peace from the conflict and, paradoxically change from your partner.”

Again, if this is the way change occurs, we have further support for Etzioni’s argument that “core assumption” of how behavior changes may be seriously in error. More often than not, individuals change without deliberate external influence. Major shifts in behavior frequently follow unexpected, unpredictable, random events.

And less powerful techniques of external control have proved to be more effective than stronger ones. For example the research of social psychologists has suggested that a person’s interest in pursuing a desirable activity is often undermined by rewarding them for it. Similarly superfluous threats for engaging in an undesirable behavior can sometimes increase rather than decrease its occurrence.

Intentional efforts to change a person’s behavior are often most effective when a subtle, low-key approach is used. While a heavy-handed approach may induce immediate compliance, it rarely leads to lasting change. The basic idea is the same as Samuel Coleridge once suggested,

Advice is like snow: the softer it falls…the deeper it sinks into the mind. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What Had Come Over Her?

In 1972 Amitai Etzioni published an article in the old Saturday Review on the difficulties of changing behavior. Etizioni argued that there is something basically wrong with most efforts to change human behavior. To be sure individuals can be taught many new skills, languages, and intellectual competencies. But when we turn to modifying fundamental values, and personality traits, as well as other persistent habits like cigarette smoking, drug addiction or overeating, we may have a far more difficult time.

Etizioni made a strong case for a re-examination of our core assumptions about the behavior change process and concluded: “We are now confronting the uncomfortable possibility that human beings are not very easily changed after all.” How then do individuals change? The authors of imaginative literature are by no means silent on this question.

In Bertold Brecht’s short story The Unseemly Old Lady a respectable seventy-two year old grandmother, who managed a household of five children in a small town in Germany, is suddenly transformed after the death of her husband. We learn about the remarkable changes in her behavior from the letters her children wrote each other about what should be done about her and from the reports her husband’s business associate, a printer,

She begins going to the cinema, something she never did before her husband died. Then she starts spending a good deal of time at a nearby cobbler’s workshop located “in a poor and even slightly notorious alley, frequented by all manner of disreputable characters.” During the summer, she would often rise very early, around 3 am, and walk about the deserted streets of the town by herself. The story is narrated by one of her grandchildren who observers,

“About six months after my grandfather’s death the printer wrote to my father saying their mother now ate at the inn every other day. That was really news! Grandmother, who in all her life had cooked for a dozen people and herself had always eaten up the leavings, now ate at the inn. What had come over her?”

Then she hires a horse-drawn vehicle that takes her on periodic trips around the countryside, sometimes in the company of a “feeble-minded” young girl. Finally, she no longer shows any interest in her family, turning away from opportunities to visit with her children or welcome them to her home. She died quite suddenly without illness a few years after her husband’s death. Her granddaughter says,

“When you come to think of it, she lived two lives in succession. The first one as daughter, wife and mother; the second simply as Mrs. B, an unattached person without responsibilities and with modest but sufficient means.” Brecht concludes, “She had savoured to the full the long years of servitude and the short years of freedom and consumed the bread of life to the last crumb.”

I also view the tale as an example of how significant changes in behavior occur quite naturally. Her grandmother’s metamorphosis is not an entirely unknown reaction following the death of a spouse. Indeed, fundamental changes in the circumstances of one’s life often serve as a catalyst for comparable shifts in behavior. A divorce, job layoff, a personal or spiritual crises, a physical illness, a family inheritance, even a good book, etc. can often set the occasion for striking out on a totally new path.

These are not the kind of conditions that can be induced by an agent of change or, for example, a communication campaign or incentive program. But when they occur naturally during the course of one’s life, they can exert a powerful effect. They are also relatively infrequent and, as a result, do not often induce a major transformation in one’s life.