Category Archives: Human Behavior

Our cities are getting too loud and those rising decibel levels are more than just a nuisance – The National

Saturday morning, my favourite cartoons on the TV and a bowl of sugary breakfast cereal on my lap. Life didn't get much sweeter for seven-year-old me. However, this tranquil oasis would shatter with the flick of the vacuum cleaner switch as my mother left no corner of the rug unclean. This was my earliest experience with noise pollution.

A global public health concern, noise pollution is defined as harmful or annoying levels of noise, with a detrimental impact on human or animal activity.

After crunching the numbers, the research team concluded that high levels of noise doubled the risk of depression and anxiety in the general population

While the disruption of my cartoon-watching was justified by the pursuit of clean carpets, there are frequent occasions where the ends do not justify the noise. A TV show disrupted is a minor inconvenience but there are situations where the level of noise pollution disrupts lives and ruins health.

This growing public health concern is linked to a range of problems, from hearing impairment and sleep disturbance to hypertension and heart disease. A report by the European Environmental Agency estimated that around 125 million Europeans, 40 per cent of the population, are regularly exposed to noise levels above 55 decibels. This is the point at which prolonged noise is potentially damaging to health. The EEA goes on to suggest that around 900 thousand cases of high blood pressure, hypertension and 43 thousand hospital admissions a year are because of noise pollution.

Beyond physical health complaints, a German study also found a link between noise pollution, depression and anxiety. The study published in the scientific journal PLOS One in 2016 included data for over 15,000 people and looked at a range of noise sources, from road and air traffic to noisy industry and loud neighbours.

After crunching the numbers, the research team concluded that high levels of noise doubled the risk of depression and anxiety in the general population. The World Health Organisation also acknowledged this link, suggesting that over long periods, noise pollution has a detrimental influence on wellbeing and perceived quality of life.

As the number of cars has increased, along with other noise-producing machines, so our cities, decade on decade, have become louder. This increase in volume can be quantified in decibels and is evident in hearing loss among city residents.

An ongoing study by Mimi Hearing Technologies, a company for digital hearing tests, has resulted in the development of the World Hearing Index. This study of hearing impairment has collected data from over 200,000 participants worldwide, using an app called Mimi that allows people to conduct a medically certified hearing assessment on their smartphones.

The findings suggest that hearing impairment is strongly related to a citys noise. People living in places with more noise pollution tend to experience more significant hearing loss. The residents of Delhi have the highest rates of hearing loss, while the residents of Vienna have the lowest. Zurich, Switzerland has the lowest levels of noise pollution, while Guangzhou, China has the highest.

Social media data is also telling and yet another way to explore how bothered people are by noise. It is clich to say that people frequently "take to Twitter to vent their outrage". This can be outrage about many things, and noise annoyance is no exception.

Our research team at Zayed University recently began looking at a sample of the UAE's Twitter data of 8 million tweets as a way of exploring the global public health concern about noise pollution. Along with our collaborators at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we developed an algorithm to identify and categorise noise complaints, pinpointing their exact location. We found all the usual categories of noise annoyance complaints being voiced in the Twitter data, from construction and traffic to noisy neighbours. The findings of this preliminary research will be published later this month in Computers in Human Behavior Reports.

Being able to see the time and location of noise annoyance complaints is essential. In future, social media could be used, along with more traditional methods, to help identify noise annoyance hotspots. Accurately identifying such problematic times and places is an excellent first step in addressing the issue.

Noise is a global public health problem that we cant ignore. Electric cars will go some way to reduce traffic noise. Another solution is to plant more greenery. One of the many benefits of trees is their efficacy in absorbing sound. They can reduce noise in their immediate vicinity by between five and 10 decibels.

Given that we have chased silence from our cities, this is one way to invite quiet back in.

Justin Thomas is a psychology professor at Zayed University

Updated: February 9, 2020 06:09 PM

Read the rest here:
Our cities are getting too loud and those rising decibel levels are more than just a nuisance - The National

Sex Pheromone Alters Brain Circuitry to Drive Both Innate and Learned Sexual Behaviors – SciTechDaily

Medial amygdala nNOS neurons activated by darcin. Neurons are in blue, neurons activated by darcin are in orange. Credit: Ebru Demir/Axel lab/Columbias Zuckerman Institute

The infamously aloof Mr. Darcy had a hard time attracting members of the opposite sex in Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice. But the same cannot be said for a sex pheromone named for him, called darcin. In a new study, a Columbia University-led team of researchers has now uncovered the process by which this protein takes hold in the brains of female mice, giving cells in the brains emotion center the power to assess the mouses sexual readiness and help her select a mate.

These findings, published in the February 6, 2020 issue of Nature, illustrate the power of a single protein to change the brain and drive behavior. They also demonstrate how a cluster of cells in one brain area integrates information from the outside world with the animals own internal state.

Pheromones act as powerful scent messages to signal the presence of danger, food or prospective mates, said Ebru Demir, Ph.D., the papers first author. With todays study, weve mapped the route that the pheromone darcin takes from the nose to the brain, bringing much-needed understanding to the mechanisms by which animals use scents to communicate, added Dr. Demir, who is an associate research scientist in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Richard Axel, MD, at Columbias Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute.

While the existence of pheromones in humans is controversial, rodents and many other animals rely on pheromones as a way to signal everything from potential danger to a willingness to mate.

Darcin is one such pheromone, discovered in 2010 by Robert Beynon, Ph.D., and Jane Hurst, Ph.D., and their team at the University of Liverpool. Dr. Hurst and her colleagues found that male mice release darcin in their urine to mark their territory and to initiate courtship displays. Sniffing a males darcin helps a female to both identify him and decide whether to mate with him. This entire process is initiated in a biologically unusual way.

Normally, mice make sense of odors using olfactory receptors in the nose. These specialized proteins send information about a scent to a designated location in the brain for further processing. Dr. Axel, who is codirector at Columbias Zuckerman Institute, received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Linda Buck, Ph.D., for their work identifying the genes that encode these receptors.

Pheromones, such as darcin, are processed somewhat differently. They interact with a second, parallel olfactory system, which exists in animals like mice but not in people.

Unlike people, mice have essentially two functional noses, said Dr. Demir. The first nose works like ours: processing scents such as the stinky odor particles found in urine. But a second system, called the vomernasal nose, evolved specifically to perceive pheromones like darcin.

For todays study, the research team, which also included Dr. Hurst, Dr. Beynon and co-senior author Adam Kepecs, Ph.D., of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, first exposed female mice to darcin-scented urine and monitored their behavior. Nearly all of the female mice showed an immediate attraction to darcin. Then, after about 50 minutes, some females began leaving their own urinary scent markings. They also started to sing, at ultrasonic frequencies too high for the human ear to hear. Both of these behaviors are an indicator of increased sexual drive.

Not all females performed these displays. Lactating mothers, for example, appeared to largely ignore the darcin-scented areas after an initial sniff of interest.

The reason for this difference, the scientists proposed, may lie in a brain region called the medial amygdala. The research team identified a subset of brain cells, or neurons, in this brain area, called nNOS neurons, that switched on in the presence of darcin.

By artificially activating those neurons, we could simulate the animals response to darcin and elicit the same behaviors, said Dr. Demir. When we silenced these neurons, the animal lost interest in darcin entirely.

The neurons location in the medial amygdala was particularly intriguing. This brain area is generally associated with hardwired emotional responses, such as fear or anger. In the case of the darcin pheromone, though, the medial amygdala may serve another role.

Our results suggest that nNOS neurons in the medial amygdala do not simply pass along information about darcin, said Dr. Demir. These neurons seem to be integrating sensory information about the pheromone with the internal state of the animal, such as whether she is a lactating mother and therefore not interested in mating.

Going forward, the research team plans to delve deeper into the neural circuitry that responds to pheromones and how changes to that circuitry drive behavior. They also hope their findings will serve to update how pheromones are defined.

Pheromones have long been associated with an innate, immediate behavioral response, but here we have shown that darcin can elicit complex behaviors that are dependent on the internal state of the animal, said Dr. Demir. As we continue our investigations, its possible that other pheromones may also act on the brain in similarly unexpected and complex ways.

This paper is titled The pheromone darcin drives a circuit for innate and reinforced behaviours. Additional contributors include Kenneth Li, Natasha Bobrowski-Khoury and Joshua Sanders, PhD.

Reference: The pheromone darcin drives a circuit for innate and reinforced behaviours by Ebru Demir, Kenneth Li, Natasha Bobrowski-Khoury, Joshua I. Sanders, Robert J. Beynon, Jane L. Hurst, Adam Kepecs and Richard Axel, 29 January 2020, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-1967-8

This research was supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Robert E. Leet and Clara Guthrie Patterson Trust Fellowship.

The authors report no financial or other conflicts of interest.

Read the original here:
Sex Pheromone Alters Brain Circuitry to Drive Both Innate and Learned Sexual Behaviors - SciTechDaily

Vienna Blood Exclusive Clip Sees Jessica De Gouw Seeking to End Relationship with Matthew Beard – Shockya.com

Actress Jessica De Gouw and actor Matthew Beard star in the PBS crime mystery drama, The Lost Child.

Instantly honest relationships can often begin intensely, but ultimately, the connections dont always last forever. Thats certainly the case for Max Liebermann and Amelia Lydgate, the characters played by Matthew Beard and Jessica De Gouw, in the crime drama, Vienna Blood. In honor of the series second mystery, The Queen of the Night, concluding on PBS tonight, February 9 at 10pm, ShockYa is premiering an exclusive clip from the episode.

In the clip, which is titled Saying Goodbye, Amelia tells Max that she values the immediate ease they developed with each other when they first met, and appreciates that they could always be truthful with each other. But she now feels that their case has been solved, they should end their relationship.

Vienna Blood follows Max (Beard), a young Englishman and student of Sigmund Freud, who teams up with Oskar (Juergen Maurer), an Austrian police detective, to solve the most horrific of crimes in turn-of-the-century Vienna. In The Queen of the Night, Oskar asks Max to help investigate a grotesque series of murders in Viennas slums.

The overall show chronicles how in the first decade of the 1900s, Vienna is a hotbed of philosophy, science and art, where cultures and ideas are espoused in the citys grand cafes and opera houses. Yet beneath the genteel glamour, nationalism and anti-Semitism are on the rise. Max is a brilliant young English-born Jewish student of the controversial psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Eager to study actual criminal activity, he is paired with the skeptical Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt, who is struggling to solve a series of particularly gruesome murders. Between Maxs extraordinary understanding of human behavior and deviance, and Oscars practical experience, the two become an unlikely detective duo, called on to solve Viennas most baffling cases.

The Queen of the Night (Part 2) follows Max and Oskar as their latest investigation draws them into the sphere of nationalistic groups who despise Viennas immigrants. Meanwhile, Maxs fiance is provoked into taking daring risks before the murderers shocking rationale is finally revealed.

The thrilling new murder mystery show was penned by acclaimed screenwriter, Steve Thompson, and is based on the best-selling novels by Frank Tallis. Vienna Blood premieres on six consecutive Sundays, January 19-February 23, from 10-11pm ET on PBS, as well as its official website and app. The episodes are also available to stream on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Chromecast, the Monday after their original air date.

Filmed on location, the Vienna Blood episodes were directed by Academy Award and Emmy Award nominee, Robert Dornhelm and Umut Da?. The show was produced by Endor Productions and MR Film, in co-production with Red Arrow Studios International, ZDF Germany and ORF (Austria), with the assistance of Fernsehfonds Austria, Film Fonds Vienna and Kultur Niederesterreich.

Summary

Title

ShockYa's Exclusive 'Vienna Blood' Clip

Description

ShockYa is premiering an exclusive clip from the PBS crime mystery drama, 'The Lost Child.'

Original post:
Vienna Blood Exclusive Clip Sees Jessica De Gouw Seeking to End Relationship with Matthew Beard - Shockya.com

In times of fake news and manufactured outrage, how do we reclaim empathy? – Scroll.in

In August 2019, police in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh decided to open an investigation into a local journalist, Pawan Jaiswal, all because he had exposed a government school for feeding its children salt and a chapati as a mid-day meal. This meal was well below the governments minimum nutrition standards. But the state didnt care about the information that was revealed, it didnt care to respond with alarm to the food that was being fed to these young children. Instead of taking action against the school authorities, the Uttar Pradesh government felt the journalist was at fault for making the government look bad, especially on video that could be circulated so widely now online. And so, it decided to charge him with cheating, using false evidence and conspiracy. The Uttar Pradesh government essentially accused him of reporting their version of fake news.

Barely two weeks after this incident, the same state government booked journalists Ashish Tomar, Shakil Ahmed and three others who tried to report on caste discrimination in the city of Bijnor. Discrediting journalists when the story doesnt suit those in power, by accusing them of peddling fake news has become par for course across the world. Populist leaders would like us to believe that news they dont like, or news they want to deny, is fake, simply because it is critical of them and their policies. These are just two cases in point, but the world is littered with such examples.

YouTube and Twitter took down several videos and posts that part of Chinas state propaganda and information wars against the Hong Kong protests aimed to the discredit news stories emerging from there in September last year. Earlier in 2019, an Indian Parliamentary committee led by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party asked Twitter to explain a liberal bias, accusing it of only targeting right wing voices as they blocked and took down abusive accounts.

So when we see politicians and world leaders call stories like Pawan Jaiswals fake news, the terminology itself stands discredited. Instead, a bigger, deeper danger confronts us what is in essence the real threat of fake news misinformation, propaganda and hate speech propagated by state machineries and co-opted media voices. Falsehoods, rumours, real news disaggregated and put back together with the aim of feeding fear and diverting public attention from accountability this kind of misinformation is all geared to stop journalists from doing their job. It is geared to sow hate division amongst the people.

We can argue that fake news is as old as time and we would be right. It has been around since news became a concept 500 years ago with the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. Rumors in Italy in the 16th century , for example, about Jewish people drinking childrens blood circulated on printed pamphlets in Italy. Printing technology gave the rumor legitimacy. Today, those rumors are considered the precursor to anti-Semitism in the world. Like the printing presss disruptive technology, broadcast technologies have also been misused to spread hate most visibly in Rwanda, where they pitted the Hutus and Tutsis against each other and exhorted violence.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan burst on to the intellectual scene by defining the media as an extension of ourselves. The phone extends our voice, the TV extends our eyes and ears, the computer extends our brain, and electronic media overall extends our central nervous system. This extension of technology, McLuhan argued can allow us to detach ourselves from the world around us. If we think about it, in an era of social media, of trolls and online abuse, the keyboard has placed distance between the abuser and the victim. That distance has empowered people to speak in the most hateful ways something that face-to-face interaction censures and discourages. Today, just as computing technology gives us access to all sorts of news and information at the click of a button it also spreads opinion, propaganda and unverified information that masquerades as news quicker than anyone could have ever imagined with more damaging consequences that anyone could have imagined.

In 2018, a spate of deaths by lynching that were the result of rumors about child kidnappers in India forced the Indian public to sit up and take a hard look at just how we were becoming part of this rumor factory. These deaths finally forced the platform, WhatsApp, to restrict our ability to forward messages without a second thought and realise, through identifiable markers that what we get isnt always an original, fresh piece of information.

In 2014, the World Economic Forum called misinformation one of the ten greatest perils confronting society. It sows the seeds of hate, waters them and harvests them. Think of these numbers WhatsApp, which is accused of being used to disseminate rumor and whip up hysteria, has 400 million users in India alone. Facebook has 2.5 billion monthly active users around the world. How often does it shock us to read comments from some of these users below the most innocuous posts? Politics, gender rights, festivals, food just about anything can spark off a verbal war about choices and biases.

Digital platforms have brought yellow journalism back to the fore. For one, algorithms that create news feeds and compilations have no regard for accuracy and objectivity. Content moderation tools need to work in tandem with human intervention. At the same time, the digital news trend has decimated the journalistic force measured in both money and manpower of the traditional free press. The advertising-based business model that supported journalism all these years has collapsed, platforms like Google and Facebook have become the most powerful news disseminators in history.

Speed and time have become compressed in our hyperconnected world and it has become next to impossible to reconcile the need for speed with the need to verify information that we either get or pass along. Technology serves not only to amplify disinformation and hate, but also creates the scope for its automated spread through bots that are learning to mimic human behavior and imitate legitimate users. This sort of technology has no use for borders, so people and machines in Ukraine can influence public opinion in America, Russian agencies can interfere with the US electoral process. And as the Cambridge Analytica scandal showed us, specific audiences that could be influenced were targetted. The manufactured information they received disguised as news confirmed their anxieties and biases.

In India, propaganda and disinformation is being used constantly to discredit political leaders, and political legacies inimical to the government. Pictures of Indias first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru being affectionate and social with women friends, or family; or lighting a cigarette, were shared by the head of BJPs IT cell accusing him of being a womaniser with westernised values; and in turn rally political support for the BJPs current leadership, projected as one that upholds/respects traditional values.

This is all profitable the flow of fabricated stories, rearranged half-truths and decontextualised facts has corroded trust in the media. Worse, it co-opted some in the mainstream media via unscrupulous politicians and media managers looking at a profitable bottom lines.

In fact, journalists in Rwanda stood trial at a United Nations court accused of inciting genocide of 800,000 people by Hutu extremists. But the legitimacy we as readers and viewers get from text, sound and images, taken out of context, however incorrectly projected, is hard to undo. Today, newsrooms around the world are prioritising the role of fact checkers precisely to call out this sort of propaganda.

But peddlers of propaganda and disinformaton have no real reputation to maintain, no incentive to stay honest. Their concern is limited to reach. And they thrive on anonymity. Automation allows them to be here today, on to another story tomorrow. Their campaigns seek to destroy what exists, what is built. They are almost messianic mobilising to raze what is, with the promise of what is to be of a phoenix rising from the ashes.

This is why conversations about the health of our democracies converge naturally around the threat from misinformation and the role its manipulators play in blurring the lines between news and opinion, rumor and fact. Misinformation is a key part of hate campaigns.

Hate for political gain.

Troll armies both, human and automated, carry out concerted campaigns especially against religious or caste minorities and refugees creating enemies out of ordinary people trying to live their lives. These campaigns prey on the most basic human emotions of fear and anger. Anger against corruption or unemployment or reservations. Anger against real or perceived economic and social privilege, for example. And fear fear of terrorism and refugees being a threat to security. The goal of disinformation is to divide and polarise society, make us less tolerant, believe that another group is worse than we are.

Hate and polarisation need an enemy, and they need fuel. In India, both are dutifully provided by politicians who harness anger and resentment with populist rhetoric. Politicians who confirm existing biases against minorities and reinforce perceptions about the targets of their hate. These campaigns disrupt beliefs in fundamental basic principles like freedom of speech, the right to life and liberty, to privacy, the right to have different opinions.

They thrive on the chaos they create forcing us, the citizens to conform to binary identities national or anti-national, globalist or patriot, Hindu or Muslim. Political groups selectively mobilise genuine devotion or religious emotion in order to manufacture both, offense and a sense of being offended Hate spin, as media theorist Cherian George calls it. They create an atmosphere of mistrust. And suddenly we dont know who or what to believe, our own convictions of right and wrong are tested.

The wedges they drive are filled by populist politicians quickly who claim they speak on behalf of the disenfranchised, when all they really want is to hold on to power. An authoritarian leader who fashions himself both as kindred underling and as a demagogic messiah to the public uses a fractured polity to his advantage. And social media gives hate and division much need oxygen. Divisive politicians use the media to foment prejudice, create confusion and celebrate ignorance.

Vitiated, ideologically polarised and aggressive politics is fast becoming a cauldron of victimhood and rage. Its objective is met when the support base is widened, a divisive narrative is created, and people are mobilised around a political agenda. The binaries are challenging our definitions of liberal democracy, of identities and nationalism. The success of propaganda and hate speech that fuels populism lies in a careful calculation of the use of state power, the manipulation of public sentiment, the rhetoric of populist politics and the influence of the media.

Liberalism that requires checks and balances and limited governance is trumped by politicians who want us to believe the state is in mortal danger. Misinformation is a common strategy of populist demagogues who try to subvert peoples trust in verifiable facts and cultivate cynicism.

As the crucible of hate speech bubbles over, space for civil debate in the public sphere has yielded to coarse, abusive conversations, fueled by manufactured outrage in TV studios. Electoral contests or policy debates are no longer based on reason but on personal charisma and tribal loyalties.

The question we need to ask ourselves is whether we can lay all the blame at technologys door? If we do that, we open up the possibility of authoritarian governments and companies driven by profit to try and regulate our responses.

That is a slippery slope.

What we can and must do instead is identify, report, counter each time we see something abusive or hateful. We must push platforms to act. We must ensure governments dont misuse calls for regulation to silence critics.

This is a fine balancing act, but one that can only work if we the public invest in our right to accurate information. So, it is really up to us to recognise now that we are just pawns on a political chessboard. Should we allow malign actors, divisive politicians or automated technologies to take over our thought process, our societal obligations? Does the keyboard replace all our interactions and determine our behaviour?

Technology is making is numb, the absence of human contact has an overwhelming impact on basic values the respect for rights and freedoms, plurality, intellectual pursuits. And most importantly, it is impacting our ability to empathise with groups targeted by this violent discourse refugees and immigrants fleeing violence or poverty in detention centres across the world, children separated from their parents, families bereft as the main breadwinner is killed by rampaging mobs all justified as retribution for perceived, past injustices.

There are examples of suffering all around us. But can we re-center ourselves and be empathetic to the suffering of those at the receiving end of this violence today? Can we initiate truth and reconciliation amongst people so that we can overcome this polarising hatred?

Instead of weaponising stereotypes or past pain and injustice, instead of retreating into nativist, tribal identities fueled by propaganda and misinformation, can we reclaim empathy as an antidote to hate?

Can we ensure we think before we share? And prevent conspiracies from spreading? Can we educate our young? Can we tell them from the minute they have a smartphone in their hands what responsible behavior online is all about? High levels of education from an early age is proving to be one of the most effective antidotes to misinformation and hate in countries like Finland can we learn from their lessons?

The media is considered democracys fourth pillar. It creates awareness about our environments, bears witness to our triumphs and to our pain, it is meant to hold power accountable. For one co-opted journalist or media manager, there are many more rededicating themselves every day to ethical, factual reporting each morning. These are committed journalists putting their life and liberty on the line to bring us stories that no one wants us to read or see.

Journalists who exposed Cambridge Analyticas influence operations did the public a service and made both governments and platforms more accountable. Journalists like Pawan Jaiswal who exposed government schools for not doing what they were mandated to do open our eyes to the everyday injustices of false political promises around us. It will take a collective of stories from good old-fashioned journalists, and a public that seeks to build bridges rather than expand gulfs between communities to turn the tide on hate and pull us out of the abyss that todays propaganda has led us into.

This article first appeared on Maya Mirchandanis blog.

Go here to read the rest:
In times of fake news and manufactured outrage, how do we reclaim empathy? - Scroll.in

Addressing technology concerns with technology – SME10X

Challenge 1: Empathy vs. AI

Jun Wu, an industry-expert, shares her thoughts: Empathy is at the heart of ethics issues related to AI Systems. Augmented reality is only believable if that reality is as close to real as possible. Commenting on the possible solution, she says: This means that AI Systems have to mimic real human emotions. Only through real human emotions and personal data from you can AI systems augment a reality that you will believe in. With the popularity of social media applications, collecting personal data from you is no longer a problem. However, the real problem lies in modeling real human emotions. If scientists can train the AI System to mimic empathy, then scientists can train the AI System to have regard for law, order and societal values. In conjunction with developing empathy in our AI Systems, we can also place limits on our AI Systems. Same way that societal values, moral code and standard of social behavior help humans live better in society, AI Systems can be integrated in a similar way to help us instead of to hurt us. Speaking along the same lines, Jesus Mantas, Global Head of Strategy and Offerings at IBM Global Business Services, shareshis thoughts with weforum.org: The road to this next stage of progress begins with designing human-AI interactions that prioritize enhancing peoples humanity, not replacing it. A passionless, automatonic future would weaken what has allowed humans to survive and thrive throughout millennia. The biggest benefits of AI will be achieved by chemistry-matching of humans and AI - and in teaching AI to be more human, we will find opportunities to learn how to be more human ourselves.

See the article here:
Addressing technology concerns with technology - SME10X

Single and ready to mingle? Texas third best state for singles – Times Record News

Claire Kowalick, Wichita Falls Times Record News Published 9:00 a.m. CT Feb. 8, 2020

If youre looking for love this Valentines Day, you might not be alone in the Lone Star state.

A recent study by WalletHub found Texas was the third best state for singles.

Using 29 key indicators of dating-friendliness, they found the state favorable in many areas including topping the list for the most restaurants and movie theaters per capita.

Florida topped the list in 2020 as best for singles, followed by California.

With about 34 percent of U.S. adults reporting that they have never been married, living in the right place might make all the difference.

Texas also ranked:

In this file photo, a young couple take a selfie during the annual lighting of the MSU-Burns Lights. Texas was listed in a recent study as the third best state for singles.(Photo: Christopher Walker/Times Record News)

Subject expert Paul Rose, Ph.D., associate dean, School of Education, Health and Human Behavior, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, saidstrong, fulfilling relationships are a key factor in human happiness. He believes people should consider living in places that they are most likely to find strong friendships and other human connections.

Singles in the dating world should not feel like they have to spend a great deal of money on a date to have a good time, Rose said.

Many of the activities that bring joy to people and set the stage for enjoyable conversations cost little or nothing, he said.

Some examples include going for a walk in a beautiful place, cheap or free concerts, plays and lectures, picnics or meals at home.

If youre frugal or are trying to establish better financial habits, planning inexpensive outings not only saves you money but also helps you assess whether you and your date are a good match, Rose said.

Diana T. Sanchez, professor at Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, said when people are single and moving to a new location, they should look at the male-to-female ratio and see if people living there match up to your values.

More than beauty and attraction, we like those who are similar to us. So, if you care about a certain cause, lifestyles, or political attitudes, you should live in a place that reflects those values or has access to those lifestyles because it will be easier to find someone who shares your passion," Sanchez said.

For the full report, visit: https://wallethub.com/edu/best-states-for-singles/31667/.

Claire Kowalick, a senior journalist for the Times Record News, covers local government, military and MSU Texas. If you have a news tip, contact Claire at ckowalick@gannett.com.

Twitter: @KowalickNews

Read or Share this story: https://www.timesrecordnews.com/story/news/local/2020/02/08/single-looking-love-texas-ranks-third-best-state-singles/4691396002/

See the original post here:
Single and ready to mingle? Texas third best state for singles - Times Record News

Are Insects Capable of Moral Behavior? – JSTOR Daily

Are insects conscious, capable of a subjective experience of the world? And, if so, can they be moral actors, or victims of immoral acts (like, say, being flushed down the toilet)? These questions interest modern scientists. And, as Jeanette Samyn writes, they also mattered to nineteenth-century naturalists who asked questions about behavior and morality in relation to the nonhuman world.

Writing in the 1810s and 1820s, British entomologists William Kirby and William Spence presented parasites as tools of God. To them, lice represented a punishment for both personal uncleanliness and for oppression and tyranny.

Still, Kirby, Spence, and other biologists wrestled with whether insects could be moral actors. Were they driven purely by instinct or capable of some sort of reason? And how could their more disgusting behaviors be reconciled with a universe ordered by God? Charles Darwin wrote that it was difficult to believe that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars. Instead, he wrote, he preferred to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not, he added somewhat glumly, that this at all satisfies me.

Other naturalists presented insects as moral beings. Some chose to focus on a few charismatic speciesnotably bees, which had long been admired as sociable, productive creatures who were helpful to humans. But Samyn points to a different take on the value of insect life presented by Louis Figuier, a French writer who interpreted science for a popular audience. His 1868 book The Insect World fascinated and repulsed readers with descriptions of astonishing insect behavior. He ascribed conscious choice, industriousness, and sociality to the bugs. In some cases, he did this by anthropomorphizing themdescribing a flea laying eggs as a foreseeing mother, for example. But often, the value he found was totally independent of human ethics, lying simply in their status as living creatures that play a part in the web of natural life. For example, he praised the marvelousindustry, patience, and dexterity and biological intelligence of parasitic fleas, ticks, and lice.

To some readers, this approach was horrifying. Cultural critic John Ruskin wrote that The Insect World made him sick with disgust by its descriptionsof all that is horrible in insect life. Ruskin wasnt just grossed out. Samyn writes that he was describing moral revulsion at the way Figuier and other naturalists celebrated what he considered mindless, instinctive behavior. To Ruskin, humans were completely distinct from other animals in that they have both instincts and consciousness, and it was only conscious effort that made human action valuable or praiseworthy.

Ultimately, of course, science can only go so far in answering questions about values and morality. But knowing whether insects really have an experience of the world might still influence how we humans think about our own values and actions.

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

By: Jeanette Samyn

Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 71, No. 1 (June 2016), pp. 89-114

University of California Press

See original here:
Are Insects Capable of Moral Behavior? - JSTOR Daily

Human Behavior: The Complete Pocket Guide – iMotions

Introduction to Human Behavior

Academic and commercial researchers alike are aiming towards a deeper understanding of how humans act, make decisions, plan, and memorize. Advances in wearable sensor technology along with procedures for multi-modal data acquisition and analysis have lately been enabling researchers all across the globe to tap into previously unknown secrets of the human brain and mind.

Still, as emphasized by Makeig and colleagues (2009), the most pivotal challenge lies in the systematic observation and interpretation of how distributed brain processes support our natural, active, and flexibly changing behavior and cognition.

We all are active agents, continuously engaged in attempting to fulfill bodily needs and mental desires within complex and ever-changing surroundings, while interacting with our environment. Brain structures have evolved that support cognitive processes targeted towards the optimization of outcomes for any of our body-based behaviors.

N.B. this post is an excerpt from our Human BehaviorGuide. You can download your free copy below and get even more insights into human behavior.

In scientific research, human behavior is a complex interplay of three components: actions, cognition, and emotions.

Sounds complicated? Lets address them one by one.

An action denotes everything that can be observed, either with bare eyes or measured by physiological sensors. Think of an action as an initiation or transition from one state to another at a movie set, the director shouts action for the next scene to be filmed.

Behavioral actions can take place on various time scales, ranging from muscular activation to sweat gland activity, food consumption, or sleep.

Cognitions describe thoughts and mental images you carry with you, and they can be both verbal and nonverbal. I have to remember to buy groceries, or Id be curious to know what she thinks of me, can be considered verbal cognitions. In contrast, imagining how your house will look like after remodeling could be considered a nonverbal cognition.

Cognitions comprise skills and knowledge knowing how to use tools in a meaningful manner (without hurting yourself), sing karaoke songs or being able to memorize the color of Marty McFlys jacket in Back to the Future (its red).

Commonly, an emotion is any relatively brief conscious experience characterized by intense mental activity, and a feeling that is not characterized as resulting from either reasoning or knowledge. This usually exists on a scale, from positive (pleasurable) to negative (unpleasant).

Other aspects of physiology that are indicative of emotional processing such as increased heart rate or respiration rate caused by increased arousal are usually hidden to the eye. Similar to cognitions, emotions cannot be observed directly. They can only be inferred indirectly by tracking facial electromyographic activity (fEMG),analyzing facial expressions, monitoring arousal using ECG, galvanic skin response (GSR), respiration sensors, or self-reported measures, for example.

Actions, cognitions and emotions do not run independently of each other their proper interaction enables you to perceive the world around you, listen to your inner wishes and respond appropriately to people in your surroundings. However, it is hard to tell what exactly is cause and effect turning your head (action) and seeing a familiar face might cause a sudden burst of joy (emotion) accompanied by an internal realization (cognition):

action = emotion (joy) + cognition (hey, theres Peter!)

In other cases, the sequence of cause and effect might be reversed: Because youre sad (emotion) and ruminating on relationship issues (cognition), you decide to go for a walk to clear your head (action).

emotion (sadness) + cognition (I should go for a walk) = action

Humans are active consumers of sensory impressionsYou actively move your body to achieve cognitive goals and desires, or to get into positive (or out of negative) emotional states. In other words: While cognition and emotion cannot be observed directly, they certainly drive the execution of observable action. For example, through moving your body to achieve cognitive goals and desires, or to get into positive (or out of negative) emotional states.

Cognitions are specific to time and situationsNew information that you experience is adapted, merged and integrated into your existing cognitive mindset. This allows you to flexibly adapt to and predict how events in the current environment may be influenced by your actions. Whenever you decide to carry out an action, you accomplish the decision in a timely, environment- and situation-appropriate manner. Put differently: Your cognitive system has to manage the dynamic interplay of flexibility and stability.

The former is important as you have to couple responses dynamically to stimuli, dependent on intentions and instructions. This allows you to respond to one and the same stimulus in near-unlimited ways. Stability, by contrast, is crucial for maintaining lasting stimulus-response relationships, allowing you to respond consistently to similar stimuli.

Imagination and abstract cognition are body-basedEven abstract cognitions (devoid of direct physical interaction with the environment) are body-based. Imagining limb movements triggers the same brain areas involved when actually executing the movements. When you rehearse material in working memory, the same brain structures used for speech perception and production are activated (Wilson, 2001).

When we talk about behavior, we need to consider how it is acquired. Learning denotes any acquisition process of new skills and knowledge, preferences, attitudes and evaluations, social rules and normative considerations.

You surely have heard of the nature nurture debate in the past, there has been quite some fighting about whether behavior was solely driven by genetic predispositions (nature) or environmental factors (nurture).

Today, its no longer a question of either/or. There simply is too much evidence for the impact of nature and nurture alike behavior is considered to be established by the interplay of both factors.

Current theoretical frameworks also emphasize the active role of of the agent in acquiring new skills and knowledge. You are able to develop and change yourself through ongoing skill acquisition throughout life, which can have an impact on a neurological level. Think of it as assigning neuroscientific processes to the phrase practice makes perfect.

Classical conditioning refers to a learning procedure in which stimulus-response pairings are learned seeing tasty food typically triggers salivation (yummy!), for example. While food serves as unconditioned stimulus, salivation is the unconditioned response.

Unconditioned stimulus -> unconditioned response

Seeing food -> salivation

If encountering food is consistently accompanied by a (previously) neutral stimulus such as ringing a bell, a new stimulus-response pairing is learned.

unconditioned stimulus + conditioned stimulus -> unconditioned response

seeing food + hearing bell -> salivation

The bell becomes a conditioned stimulus and is potent enough to trigger salivation even in absence of the actual food.

conditioned stimulus > response

hearing bell -> salivation

Described as generalization, this learning process was first studied by Ivan Pavlov and team (1927) through experiments with dogs, which is why classical conditioning is also referred to as Pavlovian conditioning.

Today, classical conditioning is one of the most widely understood basic learning processes.

Operant conditioning, also called instrumental conditioning, denotes a type of learning in which the strength of a behavior is modified by the consequences (reward or punishment), signaled via the preceding stimuli.

In both operant and classical conditioning behavior is controlled by environmental stimuli however, they differ in nature. In operant conditioning, behavior is controlled by stimuli which are present when a behavior is rewarded or punished.

Operant conditioning was coined by B.F. Skinner. As a behaviorist, Skinner believed that it was not really necessary to look at internal thoughts and motivations in order to explain behavior. Instead, he suggested to only take external, observable causes of human behavior into consideration.

According to Skinner, actions that are followed by desirable outcomes are more likely to be repeated while those followed by undesirable outcomes are less likely to be repeated. In this regard, operant conditioning relies on a fairly simple premise: Behavior that is followed by reinforcement will be strengthened and is more likely to occur again in the future.

The key concepts of operant conditioning are:

These learning theories give guidance for knowing how we gather information about the world. The way in which we learn is both emotionally and physiologically appraised. This will have consequences for how we act, and carry out behaviors in the future what we attend to, and how it makes us feel.

While behavior is acquired through learning, whether the acting individual decides to execute an action or withhold a certain behavior is dependent on the associated incentives, benefits and risks (if Peter was penalized for doing this, I certainly wont do it!).

But which are the factors driving our decisions? Theories such as social learning theory provide a base set of features, but one of the most influential psychological theoriesaboutdecision-makingactually has its origins in an economics journal.

In 1979, Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky published a paper proposing a theoretical framework called the Prospect Theory. This laid the foundations for Kahnemans later thoughts and studies on human behavior, that was summarized in his bestselling bookThinking, Fast and Slow.

Kahnemans theories were also concerned with how people process information. He proposed that there are two systems which determine how we make decisions: System 1 which is fast but relatively inaccurate, and system 2 which is slow but more accurate.

The theory suggests that our everyday decisions are carried out in one of these two ways, from buying our morning coffee, to making career choices. We will use different approaches depending on the circumstances.

Human behavior and decision-making are heavily affected by emotions even in subtle ways that we may not always recognize. After making an emotionally-fueled decision, we tend to continue to use the imperfect reasoning behind it, and a mild incidental emotion in decision-making can live longer than the emotional experience itself as pointed out by Andrade & Ariely (2009).

An example of mood manipulation affecting decision making was completed by researchers who wanted to know how a willingness to help could be affected by positive feelings.

To study their question, they placed a Quarter (25ct) clearly visible in a phone booth (yes, these things actually existed!) and waited for passers-by to find the coin. An actor working on behalf of the psychologist stepped in, asking to take an urgent phone call. Study participants who actually found the coin were significantly happier, allowing the confederate to take the call, while those who didnt find the coin were unaffected, and more likely to say no (Isen & Levin, 1972).

Research on human behavior addresses how and why people behave the way they do. However, as you have seen in the previous sections, human behavior is quite complex as it is influenced, modulated and shaped by multiple factors which are often unrecognized by the individual: Overt or covert, logical or illogical, voluntary or involuntary.

Conscious vs. unconscious behaviorConsciousness is a state of awareness for internal thoughts and feelings as well for proper perception for and uptake of information from your surroundings.

A huge amount of our behaviors are guided by unconscious processes. Just like an iceberg, there is a great amount of hidden information, and only some of it is visible with the naked eye.

Overt vs. covert behaviorOvert behavior describes any aspects of behavior that can be observed, for example body movements or (inter-)actions. Also, physiological processes such as blushing, facial expressions or pupil dilation might be subtle, but can still be obeserved. Covert processes are thoughts (cognition), feelings (emotion) or responses which are not easily seen. Subtle changes in bodily processes, for instance, are hidden to the observers eye.

In this case, bio- or physiological sensors are used to aid the observation with quantitative measures as they uncover processes that are covert in the first place. Along this definition, EEG, MEG, fMRI and fNIRS all monitor physiological processes reflecting covert behavior.

Rational vs. irrational behaviorRational behavior might be considered any action, emotion or cognition which is pertaining to, influenced or guided by reason. In contrast, irrational behavior describes actions that are not objectively logical.

Patients suffering from phobias often report an awareness for their thoughts and fears being irrational (I know that the spider cant harm me) albeit they still cannot resist the urge to behave in a certain way.

Voluntary vs. involuntary behaviorVoluntary actions are self-determined and driven by your desires and decisions. By contrast, involuntary actions describe any action made without intent or carried out despite an attempt to prevent it.In cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, for example, patients are exposed to problematic scenarios, also referred to as flooding, such as spiders, social exhibition or a transatlantic plane ride.

Many of our behaviors appear to be voluntary, rational, overt, and conscious yet they only represent the tip of the iceberg for normal human behavior. The majority of our actions are involuntary, potentially irrational, and are guided by our subconscious. The way to access this other side of behavior is to examine the covert behaviors that occur as a result.

In order to describe and interpret human behavior, academic and commercial researchers have developed intricate techniques allowing for the collection of data indicative of personality traits, cognitive-affective states and problem solving strategies.

In experimental setups, specific hypotheses about stimulus-response relationships can be clarified. Generally, research techniques employed by scientists can be classified into qualitative and quantitative procedures.

Qualitative studiesgather non-numerical insights, for example by analyzing diary entries, using open questionnaires, unstructured interviews or observations. Qualitative field / usability studies, for example, aim towards understanding how respondents see the world and why they react in a specific way rather than counting responses and analyzing the data statistically.

Quantitative studies characterize statistical, mathematical or computational techniques using numbers to describe and classify human behavior. Examples for quantitative techniques include structured surveys, tests as well as observations with dedicated coding schemes. Also, physiological measurements from EEG, EMG, ECG, GSR and other sensors produce quantitative output, allowing researchers to translate behavioral observations into discrete numbers and statistical outputs.

Behavioral observation is one of the oldest tools for psychological research on human behavior. Researchers either visit people in their natural surroundings (field study) or invite individuals or groups to the laboratory.

Observations in the field have several benefits. Participants are typically more relaxed and less self-conscious when observed at home, at school or at the workplace. Everything is familiar to them, permitting relatively unfiltered observation of behavior which is embedded into the natural surroundings of the individual or group of interest.

However, theres always the risk of distraction shouting neighbors or phones ringing. Field observations are an ideal starting point of any behavioral research study. Just sitting and watching people offers tremendous amounts of insights if youre able to focus on a specific question or aspect of behavior.

Observation in the laboratory, by contrast, allows much more experimental control. You can exclude any unwanted aspects and completely ban smart phones, control the room layout and make sure to have everything prepared for optimal recording conditions (correct lighting conditions, ensuring a quiet environment, and so on).

You can create near-realistic laboratory environments building a typical family living room, office space or creative zone, for example, to make respondents feel at ease and facilitating more natural behavior.

Surveys and questionnaires are an excellent tool to capture self-reported behaviors and skills, mental or emotional states or personality profiles of your respondents. However, questionnaires are always just momentary snapshots and capture only certain aspects of a persons behavior, thoughts and emotions.

Surveys and questionnaires typically measure what Kahneman would describe as system 2 processes thoughts that are carried out slowly and deliberately. System 1 processes thoughts that are fast and automatic can be measured by other methods that detect quick physiological changes.

In market research, focus groups typically consist of a small number of respondents (about 415) brought together with a moderator to focus on beliefs and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea or packaging. Focus groups are qualitative tools as their goal is to discuss in the group instead of coming to individual conclusions.

What are the benefits of a product, what are the drawbacks, where could it be optimized, who are ideal target populations? All of these questions can be addressed in a focus group.

While surveys and focus groups can be instrumental in understanding our conscious thoughts and emotions, there is more to human behavior than meets the eye. The subconscious mind determines how our behavior is ultimately carried out, and only a small fraction of that is accessible from traditional methodologies using surveys and focus groups.

As some researchers have claimed, up to 90% of our actions are guided by the subconscious. While the other 10% is important, it is clear that there is much to gain by probing further than what is tested by traditional methods.

Modern approaches aim to explore the hidden and uncharted territory of the subconscious, by measuring reliable outputs that provide deeper information about what someone is really thinking.

Read the rest here:
Human Behavior: The Complete Pocket Guide - iMotions

Robert Kirby: Where are the grown-ups in Washington? – Salt Lake Tribune

I forced myself to watch the State of the Union address and the final days of the impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. Post-traumatic stress doesnt even begin to cover the result.

There is a bit of hope. I used to be the most immature person I know. Today, I am far more mature than most of Congress.

Granted, this is nothing to brag about, because so is the average high school detention class, a car full of circus clowns and perhaps even the participants in a soccer riot.

Trump emerged as the gloating victor, Nancy Pelosi as the thwarted kindergartner. Not only was I embarrassed to be an American, but for a while there I also wished that I belonged to a different species.

Thats government. When people dont get what they want for Christmas, out come the tantrums.

I appreciate that we all are entitled to our own political opinions. But as someone more interested in human behavior than politics, I tend to travel both sides of the road. Behavior says a lot more than ideals.

For example, when it comes to politics, Im more of a Rep. Ben McAdams guy than a Sen. Mitt Romney guy. But guts are guts and should be noted.

As near as I can tell, the most mature person in the mess was Romney. It takes a lot of strength to defy your associates over your conscience.

I dont have much of a conscience. But people I know and respect who do have told me that it took a lot of courage for Romney to do what he did in casting a guilty vote against the president.

On Thursday, Trump acknowledged that he has done things wrong in his life, but and heres the kicker never intentionally. Meaning any wrongdoing he ever committed was entirely by accident.

Ha! If this is true and its not hes the only person in the world who has ever caused a single problem simply by not paying attention. That alone should disqualify him for the job of president.

Unlike Trump, Ive done a lot of things wrong almost all of them on purpose, including some of which Im still rather proud.

But Im not the president of the United States, any of its lesser leaders, a well-respected religious figure, a beacon of hope to the downtrodden or much of a good neighbor. Hell, I cant even drive well. Very little should be expected of me.

I couldnt make it all the way through Trumps self-congratulatory speech Thursday. Had there been even a hint of look what we got away with in the blathering to friends and supporters, I might have stuck with it.

On the other hand, I didnt bother to watch any of House Speaker Pelosis wrapup of how things came off the rails. After her grade-school stunt following Trumps State of the Union address, she should stick to paper shredding instead of government.

Then again, shes entitled to express her opinion. I wouldnt blame anyone for tearing up this column. Just make sure its real paper and not your computer monitor.

Maybe Pelosi should take a note from the president and claim that tearing up his speech was entirely unintentional.

Its not her fault that her hands went off by accident.

Originally posted here:
Robert Kirby: Where are the grown-ups in Washington? - Salt Lake Tribune

Science Hasn’t Refuted Free Will – Boston Review

Image: 9DreamStudio

A growing chorus says that science has shown free will to be an illusion. But it actually has offered arguments in its favor.

When we walk into a coffee shop, we think it is up to us whether to have an espresso, cappuccino, or strawberry-toffee-flavored latte with soymilk. Similarly, when we think about more serious matterswhich job to apply for, whether to get married, or whether to sacrifice our self-interest to do the morally right thingwe tend to think those choices are up to us, too. Of course, what we do is constrained by our environments, means, and habits. We are susceptible to subconscious influences and nudges, as psychologists and marketing experts know too well. But there still seems some room for choice. When I had my coffee this morning, I could have had a tea instead. This, in a nutshell, is the idea of free will: people have the capacity to choose and control their own actions.

An increasing number of popular science writers and some scientists are telling us that free will is an illusion.

Yet an increasing number of popular science writers and some scientists are telling us that free will is an illusion. The author Sam Harris and the biologist Jerry Coyne are just two prominent examples. When asked by Edge What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Coyne, for instance, volunteered free will, writing, Our thoughts and actions are the outputs of a computer made of meatour braina computer that must obey the laws of physics. Recently this line of thinking has even made it into popular writings by scholars in the humanities, as well. In his latest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), the historian Yuval Noah Harari speculates that in the age of big data, free will will likely be exposed as a mythand that this, in turn, has significant ramifications, among them that liberalism might lose its practical advantages.

According to the skeptics, human actions arent the result of conscious choices but are caused by physical processes in the brain and body over which people have no control. Human beings are just complex physical machines, determined by the laws of nature and prior physical conditions as much as steam engines and the solar system are so determined. The idea of free will, the skeptics say, is a holdover from a nave worldview that has been refuted by science, just as ghosts and spirits have been refuted. You have as little control over whether to continue to read this article as you have over the date of the next total solar eclipse visible from New York. (It is due to take place on May 1, 2079.)

Such free-will skepticism may not yet be embraced by the general public. Nor is it new; the philosophical debate about whether free will is compatible with determinism stretches back centuries, and the modern scientific debate has been roiling at least since the famous neuroscience experiments on the alleged neural causes of voluntary actions conducted by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s. Still, this skepticism makes trouble for some deeply held views about ourselves. The idea of free will is central to the way we understand ourselves as autonomous agents and to our practices of holding one another responsible.

Lawyers, for example, are well aware of that, and the questions that neuroscience raises for the law have become a growing area of study in legal scholarship. How, for instance, could we blame and punish people for something they did not do out of their own free will? When an avalanche harms someone, it would not occur to us to blame the avalanche: unlike you and me (at least as most people see it), it is not a moral agent capable of responsibility. When a person harms another, we hold that person responsible. If the skeptics are right, this is a mistake. In both the human case and the avalanche, the skeptics say, the harm results from physical processes inside a heap of atoms and molecules.

The idea of free will, the skeptics say, is a holdover from a nave worldview that has been refuted by sciencejust as ghosts and spirits have been refuted.

Some free-will skepticsincluding Harris and Coyne but also the philosophers Derk Pereboom and Gregg Carusowelcome these implications. They point out that, as a society, we are far too obsessed with responsibility, punishment, and retribution. Many of the worlds criminal justice systems are inhumane as well as counterproductive. The skeptics have a point here, but one can support criminal justice reform while holding on to ones belief in free will. Human dignity and restorative justice should be reasons enough to focus more on rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders and on tackling the social background conditions of crime. Giving up on the idea of free will, by contrast, would have other unsettling implications, independently of anything to do with blame and punishment. For example, how could we sincerely deliberate about important choices if we didnt take ourselves to be free in making those choices? The philosopher Immanuel Kant already understood this problem when he noted that we must view ourselves as free when we engage in practical reasoning.

It is important to ask, then, whether free will can be defended against the skeptical voices, or whether, instead, its defenders are clinging to a superstition. I think that science has not refuted free will, after all. In fact, it actually offers arguments in its defense.

Contemporary free-will skepticismat least of the kind that appeals to scienceis part and parcel of a reductionistic worldview, according to which everything is reducible to physical processes. If we look at the world from the perspective of fundamental physics alone, then we will see only particles, fields, and forces, but no human agency, choice, and free will. Human beings, like everything else, will look like subsystems of a large impersonal physical universe. Of course, skeptics say that this is, in fact, what science implies. To suggest that human beings are anything beyond physical systems would be to revert to seventeenth-century metaphysics, the sort of mind-body dualism endorsed by Ren Descartes from which modern science has moved on.

Science has not refuted free will, after all. In fact, it actually offers arguments in its defense.

But it is a mistake to equate science with reductionism. Science does not force us to think of humans as nothing more than heaps of interacting particles. To the contrary, in the sciences of human behaviorfrom anthropology and psychology to economics and sociologyit is standard practice to think of people as intentional agents with a capacity for making choices and responding intelligently to their environments. Scholars in these fields explain human actions by depicting people as choice-making agents with beliefs and desires, goals and plans, on the basis of which they decide which actions to pursue. Different academic fields spell out the details in different wayswith different levels of emphasis on, for instance, the relationship between individual and structural factors influencing human actionsbut the general supposition of intentional agency is nonetheless present in all of them. This explanatory practice does not assume anything supernatural. It just reflects the fact that agency, intentionality, and choice are essential postulates if we wish to make sense of human behavior. So, the first point to note is that science would have a hard time explaining human behavior if it didnt view people as choice-making agents.

To illustrate, think about how we answer familiar questions about humans. Why does someone who has made an appointment normally show up? Why does a taxi driver take you to your specified destination? Why do consumers respond to price changes? Why do people support the political movements they do? In each case, the picture of humans as choice-making agents helps us to give the answer. The behaviors in question are readily intelligible if we think of people as having agency, intentionality, and choice. They are faced with different options, look at these options from their perspective, and select one of the options in a goal-directed and more or less intelligible manner, even if the resulting choices are not always fully rational. If we thought of people as mere physical machines, we would miss the intentional, goal-directed nature of their actions and get overwhelmed with physical details. We wouldnt see the forest for the trees. It would be like trying to explain investors market transactions, voters electoral choices, or peoples cultural activities from the perspective of particle physics. Physics and even physiology are not the right approaches for explaining human behavior in its full rangeholistically,we might say. At most, they can give us some insights into the mechanisms by which agency is generated in physical organisms. This is not to belittle those insights. Human agency and choice are among the most remarkable phenomena the physical world has produced, and as scientists and philosophers will acknowledge, there is much more to be explained. But this does not justify a reductionistic approach according to which the phenomena themselves are overlooked and get to be discounted.

Science does not force us to think of humans as nothing more than heaps of interacting particles.

Now, once we think of human beings in this nonreductionistic way, we are actually presupposing some form of free will, though liberated from supernatural undertones. That there is such a presupposition in our explanations of human behavior is seldom acknowledged, perhaps because free will is such a controversial concept and the practitioners of the relevant sciences may be reluctant to get drawn into metaphysical debates unless strictly necessary. However, free will, soberly speaking, can be defined as the capacity for intentional agency, choice among alternative possibilities, and control over the resulting choices. This capacityit should be clearis presupposed when scientists depict people as choice-making agents, whether in anthropology, psychology, economics, or sociology.

The skeptics will object that all this is at best a useful fiction, at worst a harmful one. At any rate, they will say, the free-will presupposition is not literally true. But consider how scientists settle questions about what is and is not real.

Why do scientists accept gravity and electromagnetism as real, but not ghosts and spirits? The answer is that science must refer to gravity and electromagnetism to explain physical phenomena, and these properties are indispensable ingredients of a coherent theory of the world, while postulating ghosts and spirits is not only useless but also prone to introducing all sorts of incoherencies. Generally, to figure out whether some entity or property is real, scientists ask two questions: first, is postulating the entity or property necessary for explaining the world, and second, is it coherent with the rest of our scientific worldview? If the answer to both questions is yes, then the entity or property meets the reality check, and scientists feel ready to include it in their inventory of the world, at least provisionally.

If the human and social sciences must postulate intentional agency and choice to explain human behavior, then those properties pass the first part of the scientific reality test: they are explanatorily indispensable.

This test, a version of Occams Razor, can be applied not just to physics. It also supports the reality of higher-level entities and properties such as ecosystems, institutions, and poverty. These, too, must be accepted as real if we wish to explain our world, and they are ingredients of a coherent scientific worldview, even if fundamental physics does not speak about them. When we think about free will through the lens of this test, we get a new perspective. If the human and social sciences must postulate intentional agency and choice to explain human behavior, then those properties pass the first part of the scientific reality test: they are explanatorily indispensable.

What about the second partcoherence with the rest of our scientific worldview? Here, the skeptics will object that if the fundamental laws of physics are deterministiclike the mechanisms of a precise clockworkthen there is no hope of rendering the notion of choice-making coherent. At any point in time, there will be only one possible future sequence of events, given the physical past. Traditionally, physical theoriesfrom Isaac Newtons classical mechanics to Albert Einsteins theories of relativityhave tended to represent the world this way.

Furthermore, even though indeterminism and randomness seemed to enter physics with the emergence of quantum mechanics (at least on the well-known Copenhagen interpretation), it is still an open question whether future, more advanced theories will retain this indeterminism. Einstein was famously unconvinced by the idea of indeterministic physical laws when he said, God does not play dice. Given that determinism has not been conclusively ruled out by science, therefore, we cant count on quantum mechanics to defend free willnot to mention that quantum indeterminacies would probably be a farfetched source of free will anyway. Indeed, hard determinist skeptics insist that we never have any real choices. When you appeared to make a choice about whether to read this essay, only one option was genuinely available (reading it, as you are doing right now); the other option never existed.

These are subtle issues, but deterministic physical laws arguably do not preclude forks in the road within human agency. An agents future choices can be open at a psychological level even if the underlying physics is deterministic. Though this may sound counterintuitive, the distinction between determinism and indeterminism cannot be drawn independently of the level of description at which we are looking at the world. A system can behave deterministically at one levelsay, the microphysical oneand indeterministically at anothersay, the level associated with some special science: chemistry, biology, meteorology, and so on.

Deterministic physical laws arguably do not preclude forks in the road within human agency. An agents future choices can be open at a psychological level even if the underlying physics is deterministic.

Physicists themselves recognize this point in the field of statistical mechanics, which describes how indeterministic macro phenomena can result from deterministic micro processes. The weather, for instance, is a macro system that behaves indeterministically even though the atmosphere consists of a large number of individual molecules that each movearound according to deterministic laws of motion. At a macro level, then, the Earths atmosphere can be thought of as indeterministic, despite being deterministic at a micro level. As the philosopher of physics Jeremy Butterfield puts it, a systemsmicro- and macro-dynamics need not mesh. And, I would argue, such emergent indeterminism is not just apparent. It is best interpreted not as epistemicdue to incomplete information about the worldbut as ontic: a feature of what the world is like. So, to cut a long story short, the sciences give us the resources to show that forks in the road in human decision-making can co-exist with determinism in physics. Of course, the openness of human choices is not just a phenomenon of statistical mechanics; it comes from option availability as described by our best explanatory theories of human decision-making.

For the time being, then, the hypothesis of free will is corroborated by the sciences of human behaviour. Free will, for the purposes of the human and social sciences, boils down to agency, intentionality, and choice, which are well-supported and indeed explanatorily indispensable ideas. Denying free will would be warranted only if these ideas werent needed for explaining human behavior or if they were somehow incoherent, which they arent.

To be sure, future science might vindicate a reductionistic approach and explain human behavior without representing people as choice-making agents. But science doesnt seem to be heading that way. So far, psychology, broadly speaking, has resisted reduction and has been augmented but not replaced by neuroscience. Just as we wouldnt deny the reality of ecosystems, institutions, and poverty merely because fundamental physics doesnt refer to them, so there is no reason to deny the reality of agency, choice, and free will either. The skeptics mistake is to assume a reductionistic picture of humans that is neither mandated by science, nor adequate for understanding human behavior.

Read the original here:
Science Hasn't Refuted Free Will - Boston Review