The Dish

The Biological Basis Of Metaphors

Tom Bartlett reports on a relatively new area of inquiry:

Research on embodied cognition – the idea, basically, that the body strongly influences the mind in multiple ways we’re not aware of (though not everyone agrees with that definition) – is a fairly new field, and in the last few years it has produced a number of head-scratching results. For instance, there’s the 2009 study that seems to show that people holding heavy clipboards are more likely to disagree with weak arguments than people holding light clipboards. Or the study, also published in 2009, that found that people gripping a warm cup of coffee judged others as having a “warm” personality.

Another study indicated that that people who like sweet foods are more likely to volunteer – or as Bartlett puts it, “They were metaphorically sweet people who loved actual sweets”:

That finding hits on one of the underlying ideas of embodied cognition – that is, that the metaphors we toss around are grounded in more concrete, physiological truths. Warm things make you physically and psychologically warmer. Cold things make you feel more alienated. Sweet things make you sweeter, and liking sweet things means you behave more sweetly.

Now there are plenty of people, including some psychologists, who are skeptical about some of those results. I wrote about the critics of John Bargh’s research – he did the coffee-mug experiment – in an article last year. And a study that purported to show that people were more generous after riding an “up” escalator was shot down by Uri Simonsohn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a dry-witted crusader against suspicious statistics. (The Dutch researcher who did the escalator study, Lawrence Sanna, later resigned.) But that doesn’t mean embodied cognition as a whole is wrong, of course.

“Professional courtesy” among police officers refers to the idea that cops should not arrest or ticket other cops for traffic violations. Balko explains how this custom leads to miscarriages of justice and invites serious corruption:

Police officers who fail to extend professional courtesy to fellow officers can face ridicule, shaming and other retaliation. It’s an extension of the “Blue Code of Silence,” the informal admonition that cops refrain from implicating other cops. Several years ago there was even a Web site called “Cops Writing Cops” which provided a forum for police officers to publicly shame fellow cops who had the audacity to ticket them. (The site has since been taken down.) A 2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer study revealed that off-duty cops put stickers in the windows of their private vehicles to identify themselves to their fellow officers. And then there are outfits like “LEO Pro Cards,” a business that prints up handy, wallet-sized cards that cops and their family members can flash to request professional courtesy from other officers. …

You’ll often see the tradition defended as just a small, insignificant gesture between professionals who share a tough job. But if anything, cops should be held to a higher standard than everyone else. They are after all given the considerable power to arrest, detain and kill. Once cops start letting other cops off for traffic offenses, you begin to instill in some police officers the idea that they’re less beholden to the law than the average citizen, not more. It isn’t difficult to see how that could set the stage for more consequential corruption.

The Negative Side Of Positive Thinking

Adam Alter explains:

According to a great deal of research, positive fantasies may lessen your chances of succeeding. In one experiment, the social psychologists Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer asked 83 German students to rate the extent to which they “experienced positive thoughts, images, or fantasies on the subject of transition into work life, graduating from university, looking for and finding a job.” Two years later, they approached the same students and asked about their post-college job experiences. Those who harbored positive fantasies put in fewer job applications, received fewer job offers, and ultimately earned lower salaries. The same was true in other contexts, too. Students who fantasized were less likely to ask their romantic crushes on a date and more likely to struggle academically. Hip-surgery patients also recovered more slowly when they dwelled on positive fantasies of walking without pain.

Heather Barry Kappes, a management professor at the London School of Economics, has published similar research with Oettingen. I asked Kappes why fantasies hamper progress, and she told me that they dull the will to succeed: “Imagining a positive outcome conveys the sense that you’re approaching your goals, which takes the edge off the need to achieve.”

I wonder if she’s analyzed a few neoconservatives along the way.

The Vanilla Icing Of Rap, Ctd

A reader writes:

I’m not saying the white boy you posted doesn’t have skills, but the alphabet rapping concept, including progressive acceleration, was done a long time ago by Blackalcious [see above]. I’m more okay with white boys having their place in hip hop if they bring their own perspective and style to the table, like The Streets for example.

Another points to a true original:

A white (as in, albino white), legally blind, Muslim rapper from the Midwest: Brother Ali. He’s been, at times, inspiring to those who are perceived as different (a song called Forrest Whittaker); at times controversial (Uncle Sam, Goddamn); and, always, pretty intelligent and insightful (Dorian, about confronting his physically abusive neighbor, and Travelers, about slavery, African plight, and cultural repercussions for acting so immorally then). He’s not for everyone, but he is very talented.

This freestyle by Brother Ali is pretty amazing:

Thoughts At Twilight

Roger Angell, age 93, pens a lovely essay about growing old:

A few notes about age is my aim here, but a little more about loss is inevitable. “Most of the people my age is dead. You could look it up” was the way Casey Stengel put it. He was seventy-five at the time, and contemporary social scientists might prefer Casey’s line delivered at eighty-five now, for accuracy, but the point remains. We geezers carry about a bulging directory of dead husbands or wives, children, parents, lovers, brothers and sisters, dentists and shrinks, office sidekicks, summer neighbors, classmates, and bosses, all once entirely familiar to us and seen as part of the safe landscape of the day. It’s no wonder we’re a bit bent. The surprise, for me, is that the accruing weight of these departures doesn’t bury us, and that even the pain of an almost unbearable loss gives way quite quickly to something more distant but still stubbornly gleaming. The dead have departed, but gestures and glances and tones of voice of theirs, even scraps of clothing—that pale-yellow Saks scarf—reappear unexpectedly, along with accompanying touches of sweetness or irritation.

“Shadows Of History You Can Actually See”

Bill Bonner, the subject of the above film, keeps watch over millions of archival National Geographic images. Kathryn Carlson offers a glimpse into his life:

Bill works alone, in a cold windowless room in the basement of National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington. But even though he spends the days mostly by himself, he says he is kept company by the millions of people immortalized in the photographs. To him, they are his ancestors, and he treats each photo like it is the greatest treasure in the world. …

The respect that Bill shows each photograph is heartwarming. He firmly believes that each image holds a memory, and in many cases those memories have been buried alive by time. They are forgotten and unseen by the outside world, even though they hold great insights into its past.

(Hat tip: PetaPixel)

Comical Racism

Noah Berlatsky explores the controversy over the selection of Michael B. Jordan to play Johnny Storm in the new Fantastic Four movie, asking why this deviation from comic book canon – a black actor playing an originally white character – is such a problem when others are overlooked:

American racism holds that only certain racial differences matter. Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Irish—all those people are white and can play one another with nary an eyebrow raised. Nobody is worried about whether Sue Storm has exactly the mix of Irish, German, and French-Canadian ancestry as Kate Mara, who has been cast to play her. For that matter, no one would say a thing if the actors cast to play Sue and Johnny, sister and brother, came from different ethnic backgrounds and didn’t look much alike. It’s only when one is black and one is white that you need to start worrying about family logistics. (And yes, you can find folks doing that on Twitter as well—because getting turned into living fire by cosmic rays is an everyday thing, but adoption is weird.)

“Fans often seem to believe that if a character is changed from white to black, they will no longer be able to identify with that superhero” Aaron Kashtan, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech who teaches a course on transmedia storytelling, wrote in an email to me. Kashtan adds that this is an example of “unconscious or overt racism”—a point underlined by the fact that the barriers to identification are so clearly arbitrary. Certain different people—Jews, or Irish, or folks with a hide made of orange rock—can be points of identification. Others, especially African-Americans or anyone with dark skin, can’t. The issue here isn’t staying true to the original. The issue is racism.

Daniel D’Addario adds:

The sort of franchise fans whose tweets get quoted in industry stories after big casting decisions see themselves as incapable, apparently, of empathizing with anyone not of their race; in order for a character to be understandable on-screen, that character must be white. But fans will, of course, end up going to see the movie — if you like the “Fantastic Four” characters, you’re simply not going to skip it because you disagree with a casting choice — and will discover what nonwhite movie fans have known for years: There’s no impediment to understanding a character’s motivations and actions simply because he’s of a different race than yours.

Update from a reader:

An even more egregious example happened just a few years ago. When the live-action version of Marvel’s Thor was put into production, there was an enormous uproar in the comics community among people who simply could not accept that Idris Elba, a black man, had been chosen to play Heimdall.

It’s important to note that Heimdall is a god, and his job is to stand guard on the Rainbow Bridge and watch for attacks on Asgard. I guess you could sort of make a case (clearly a racist case) for the notion that changing Johnny Storm from white to black in the new Fantastic Four movie would limit some people’s ability to “identify” with him. But Elba was to play a god. A fictional god. Who does nothing but stand on a mythical bridge, listening intently for invasions by other gods. Who could “identify” with that?

But I’m not totally sure it’s some kind of deeply-held traditional racism at work. Interestingly I think with the Elba casting with Thor, an enormous amount of the fanboys who complained actually were just sharing their initial gut feelings; and I would say the vast majority became completely comfortable with the casting of Elba soon thereafter. I don’t think they were particularly racist; it was just that Elba appeared so visibly “different” than what they had grown up on. It reminded me of many people who, 5-10 year ago opposed gay marriage; not out of any particular anti-gay animus – more from a “Wait, what? That’s for men and women” kind of thinking. But that opposition was a millimeter thick.

I’m embarrassed to admit I wasn’t a lot different 10 years ago; the idea of gay marriage just seemed totally from Mars; and I was a VERY progressive person. Now that it’s “traditional” marriage is thankfully going the way of the Dodo I am constantly asking myself, why didn’t I spend two seconds really thinking this through earlier? I suspect any opposition to Michael B. Jordan’s casting will have a similar arc.

Face Of The Day

An anti-fracking campaigner wears a hessian mask as he stands in the doorway to his tent in Barton, England on February 24, 2014. Plans to evict activists, who have been camped outside the Barton Moss gas fracking exploration facility, have been put on hold whilst their lawyers make a legal challenge in the courts. Up to 60 campaigners have been on the site in Barton Moss Road since November and are waiting anxiously for the next court hearing on March 6, 2014. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

Do Children Have A Right To Die? Ctd

A reader feels that Belgium is moving in the right direction to legalize euthanasia for terminally-ill kids:

I don’t see why we should force a child to suffer when death is imminent in the short term, the child wants to die, the parents consent, and the doctors are in agreement. I think people in the US need to be much more rational and realistic about these things. The reality is that with the advances in modern medicine, we are also condemning people to longer suffering before we allow them to die. Now that we have the power to postpone death almost indefinitely, we should wield that power wisely and humanely.

But another is skeptical:

The problem with the “guidelines” is that they slowly but inevitably widen. In the Netherlands, you can now obtain assisted suicide when you suffer from normal geriatric conditions like hearing/sight loss/fatigue, or mental health issues such as depression. And these guidelines also have to work in conjunction with a patient’s right to refuse a particular treatment. So you have a situation where a depressed person can be a suicidal (a symptom of their condition) and refuse therapy or medication because it is their right to do so, and then can opt for assisted suicide because their suffering is unbearable to them (to mention nothing of the informed consent issues around such patients). And the Netherlands have already used their euthanasia laws to euthanize babies born with severe spina bifida, despite the fact that such children could live long and fruitful lives with modern pain-reduction treatments.

It’s much harder to close the gate once it’s open. I’d prefer any country use its resources to improve pain management rather than bring in these laws.

A Dutch reader unloads:

How dare this reader judge the fate of these babies.

Let me first protest with the phrasing of the reader. The Netherlands – as a country – did not use their laws. The Netherlands – as a country – democratically passed complex laws with the intent of limiting the suffering of patients. The parents of those babies made a heart-wrenching choice. And who better to have the freedom of deciding the fate of their babies than the parents? These decision are not taken lightly. This is not an easy process.

Again, how dare that reader evaluate the life of those babies, while he knows nothing else than an ethics paper describing the legal path the parents chose. As a Dutch citizen, I get pretty pissed when foreigners denigrate our thoughtful laws to bylines. The legal framework of all these laws is incredibly thoughtful and thorough. These are good processes. They offer choices and freedom. Nobody is being forced to do anything at all. The only way you can object is if you just object by principle to whatever is allowed. But you should realize then that you are letting your freedom of religion limit the freedoms of others.

(And now a little rant – maybe not appropriate, but it gots to get out)

It pisses me off even more when supposedly freedom-loving Americans criticize our laws. A couple of reminders:

– We were the first country to recognize the US as an independent nation.
– We were the first to realize that everybody deserves the freedom to marry whom they choose. We have a lower divorce rate than the US.
– We were the first not to go bonkers on pot. We have considerably lower drug use rates than the US.
– We were pretty early on with a very balanced abortion law that works and does not allow partial birth abortion.
– We have a lower abortion rate as well as a lower teen-pregnancy rate.
– We were one of the first with a decent euthanasia law. The US has a hysterical debate about death panels.

(end rant)

By the way, the minister who enacted many of our laws, Els Borst, was found dead laying next to her car recently. Police is investigating and hold all options open.

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