Testing the Waters

Blind Lunch
One day when I was walking around Florence I chanced upon a store-front window, looked in and saw a man and a woman having lunch together. That was all—one table, two chairs, two people eating lunch. By the door was a sign directing the reader to a website where I subsequently read the following message (translated from the Italian):

Sharing a private moment with a stranger, it means giving up the surprise, let go and let himself be invaded. Blind Lunch takes place within a window, the only boundary that separates the public from the private sector, which faces directly onto the street. The space is transformed into a cozy and intimate with a central dining table, a meeting point where two people unknown to each other, eat a meal together.

Fancy that, I thought. Wouldn’t it be amusing, perhaps even interesting, to give it a try? I sent an email (in English) to the indicated address expressing my interest and never heard a word in reply.

Experimenting Society
A note from the Web a while ago: Today Vermont is set to make history by becoming the first state in the nation to offer universal, single-payer healthcare when Gov. Peter Shumlin signs its healthcare reform bill into law. The Vermont plan, called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, will attempt to stem rising medical care prices and provide universal coverage... Dr. Deb Richter, president of Vermont Health Care for All … moved from Buffalo, New York, to Vermont in 1999 to advocate for a universal, single-payer healthcare system in the state. Gov. Shumlin calls her the “backbone” of the grassroots effort that helped persuade the Democratic-led state legislature to pass the bill this spring.

Here is an example of an experimenting society at its best. First try something new on a small scale. Then evaluate the results. If the outcome is positive, continue with the program. If it isn’t, try something different. This approach is easy to do when applied to limited number of people. Making changes, as well as mistakes is less risky in small groups or organizations. I have found that to be the case whenever I have observed the origin of significant social changes. The smaller the country, state or academic setting, the easier it is to experiment with change and then in light of its effects, decide whether or not to apply it on a larger scale.

Study Thyself
Reading a book isn’t quite as simple as it used to be. Now a reader is given a choice, print version, Kindle, iPad1 or iPad2, Nook, or mobile phone. It is rather like going to the market to get some cereal where you find yourself confronted with one long shelf above another of a countless number of choices. In the Times last week Nick Bilton describes the way he went about deciding how to read a book. He writes,

“This might not sound so extraordinary, but I didn’t just read a book in print, on an e-reader or even a mobile phone. Instead I read a book on dozens of devices….I wanted to answer a question I often hear: which e-reader or tablet is the best for reading books?”

The book he selected was The Alienist by Caleb Carr and he read sections of it on eleven (11) different devices plus “a crumply old print paperback.” The gadgets included the Kindle, the Google Nexus S Android phone, the iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy Tablet, the iPads (1 & 2), the Nook and laptop computer. For each device he describes its desirable and undesirable features.

A single person trying various approaches by themselves (self-experiments) or with one other individual (single subject research) often leads to important discoveries in science. Examples include Herman Ebbinghaus on memory, Freud on the unconscious, and Albert Hoffman on psychedelic drugs. While Bilton was far from doing scientific research he was going about the decision on how best to read a book by doing a little “experiment” on himself.

While he says reading the paperback version of the novel was frustrating because he couldn’t easily look up things as he could on his iPhone, in the end, he concluded to my immense pleasure, “But if money is tight, go for print. My used paperback cost only $4.” Not only that but he could mark it up any old way he liked.

Now Or Later

Imagine the following situation. You agree to participate in an experiment. You arrive at the laboratory and the experimenter presents you with a choice. You may have $50 now or, if you wait a week and return, you will be able to receive $75. What do you do? The $50 is yours for the asking now. But if you delay for a week, you’ll get a good deal more. The paradigm is not entirely fanciful; in fact, it mirrors an actual experiment on young children that has been repeated countless times.

In the original experiment a young child is offered one marshmallow or if she is willing to wait while the experimenter steps out of the office for a few minutes, two marshmallows can be taken when he returns. The experimenter says that if she rings a bell on the desk while he is away, he will come quickly back and she can eat one marshmallow but will forfeit the second. Then he leaves the room.

This experiment was first conducted by Walter Michel, a personality/social psychologist, in order to identify the factors that allow some individuals to delay gratification. The results of some of his studies are discussed by Jonah Lehrer in the May 18th New Yorker. Lehrer reports:

“About thirty per cent of the children…successfully delayed gratification until the researcher returned, some fifteen minutes later. These kids wrestled with temptation but found a way to resist.”

The other 70% of the children were unable to resist the taking the marshmallows, cookies or toys among the various other temptations that have been used to explore the phenomena of delayed gratification. Further research has suggested an interesting link between children’s academic performance as teen-agers and their ability to delay. For example,

“…low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavior problems, both in school and at home. They got lower SAT scores (on average two hundred and ten points lower than the kid who could wait)…. …low delaying adults have a significantly higher body-mass index and are more likely to have had problems with drugs.”

Mischel seems to have tapped a fundamental dimension of personality, one capable of predicting a wide range of significant behaviors. The dimension is one of self-control, the ability to control oneself, in particular one's emotions and desires and to bring the long-term consequences of behavior to bear on the choices made in the present.

It is clear that people vary enormously in their ability to control their own behavior. It is also one of the dimensions of a person’s character that seems to be fairly consistent over the long term. But like most other behaviors, it is one that can be learned. Mischel notes that “…as I watched my own kids, I marveled at how they gradually learned how to delay and how that made so many other things possible.”

Mischel reports that a substantial number of individuals who were unable to delay gratification as four-year olds in time became high-delaying adults. He comments, “this is the group I’m most interested in. They have substantially improved their lives….self-control skills can be taught.” Since the ability to delay gratification is also a far better predictor of academic performance than IQ, this suggests a promising technique for boasting the intellectual skills of individuals of all ages.

Current work has turned to new self-control tasks that are more appropriate for testing adults. Following current trends in psychology, other research has focused on the neural correlates of the ability to postpone gratification, a trend that for this observer is of questionable merit. As Mischel notes, “The real question is what can we do with this fMRI data that we couldn’t do before?” This is a question I ask every time I read a study of the neural correlate(s) of some aspect of personality or behavior. Regrettably, they constitute a sizable number of the studies reported in the major journals these days.