The perils of 'having it all'

It’s fair to say that Thurston Howell III doesn’t savor the little things in life. One of seven castaways on an uncharted Pacific island, the WASPy billionaire never stops scheming to get back to his money. While the others often seem content in their tropical paradise, Howell mostly likes to talk and dream about his assets, which include a coconut plantation, a railroad, an oil well, a diamond mine and all of Denver, Colorado. He never seems to understand that his wealth won’t buy him happiness on Gilligan’s Island.

Okay, so Gilligan’s Island isn’t real. I get that. But is it possible this old TV fantasy contained a grain of psychological truth? Can “having it all” undermine the ability to savor common, everyday joys? And if so, does wealth diminish pleasure enough that it trumps the plusses of having plenty of money?

An international team of scientists has been exploring these questions. Psychologist Jordi Quoidbach of the University of Liege, Belgium, and his colleagues wondered if wealth, because it promises abundant pleasure, might actually weaken the internal sense of scarcity that makes small pleasures possible. They decided to test this idea in the lab.

They recruited a large group of university employees, ranging from deans to janitors. The idea was to get a range of incomes and financial comfort, which they did: Some of the volunteers had socked away 75,000 euros or more, while others had a mere 1,000 euros in savings. They gave all of these volunteers a test that uses vignettes to gauge positive emotions like pride and awe and contentment. For example, they might be asked to imagine going on a hike and discovering an amazing waterfall. Would they be visibly emotional? Reminisce about the waterfall later? Tell others about the experience? And so on.

The scientists also measured the volunteers overall happiness, using a standardized scale, and also their desire for wealth. They measured desire for wealth with this kind of question: How much money would you have to win in a lottery to live the life of your dreams?

Then they crunched all these data together to sort out the links between money and savoring and happiness, and here’s what they found: The more money people have, the less likely they are to savor things like waterfalls or blooming flowers or quiet weekends. What’s more, cause-and-effect was clear from the data. That is, the ability to savor life’s small pleasures was not diminishing the need or desire for money; it was the other way around.

And overall happiness? That’s the really interesting part. There is a modest relationship between wealth and happiness; that’s not all that surprising. But the inability to appreciate waterfalls undercuts money’s blessings. That is, any positive effects of wealth on happiness were offset by wealth’s deleterious effects on ability to savor life’s pleasures.

These findings, reported this week in the on-line version of Psychological Science, were provocative enough that the researchers wanted to double-check them in a different way. So in a second experiment, they used photographs of cash to prime thoughts of money in some of the volunteers. And just in case the volunteers were unintentionally distorting their feelings about waterfalls and honeysuckle and other small things in life, the scientists decided to actually observe them. So instead of using hypothetical vignettes, they gave all the volunteers a piece of chocolate to eat, and they had dispassionate observers rate the chocolate savoring experience: How slowly did they eat the chocolate? Did they close their eyes, or makes sounds of pleasure? And so forth.

Mmmm. The pleasure was unmistakable—but only for those without money in mind. The moneyed volunteers rushed through the chocolate like it was celery, and showed about that much pleasure in the experience.

All of this suggests that being rich—and having access to the best things in life—may actually queer our ability to enjoy the small, sweet things in life. What’s more—as the priming study indicates—just knowing we have access to the trappings of wealth is enough to make us take small pleasures for granted—and not appreciate them. And as Thurston Howell III can testify, being filthy rich can even take the joy out of an island paradise.

For more insights into the quirks of the human mind, visit Wray Herbert’s “Full Frontal Psychology” blog at True/Slant. Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” also appear regularly in The Huffington Post and in the magazine Scientific American Mind. Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

The New Phrenology?

Phrenology was the intellectual rage of 19th century America. Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman each incorporated bits of the popular personality theory into his works, and Herman Melville went so far as to make his most famous narrator, Ishmael, an amateur phrenologist. The essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson was obsessed with the practice, alternating between enthusiasm and fear about phrenology’s deterministic view of the brain and behavior.

For those who need a quick refresher, phrenology was the theory that an individual’s personality could be “read” from the shape of his skull. The bumps and depressions in the cranium were thought to represent the shape of the brain below, which itself was determined by the volume of the 27 discrete “brain organs.” These brain modules presumably housed such personality traits as cleverness, pride, wit, and affection.

Phrenology is considered pseudoscience today, but it was actually a vast improvement over that era’s prevailing views of personality. For example, phrenology for the first time recognized the brain as the “organ of the mind,” although phrenologists lacked the sophisticated tools of modern neuroscience and could only speculate on the details. Unfortunately, they got the details laughably wrong.

But phrenology may be undergoing a redemption of sorts. Not the skull part—that’s still considered bunk. But neuroscientists today are using their new tools to revisit and explore the idea that different personality traits are localized in different brain regions. The emerging field of personality neuroscience is producing some intriguing early results.

Two of the leaders in this new field are psychologists Colin DeYoung of the University of Minnesota and Jeremy Gray of Yale, who have been using a brain scanner to search for evidence of the so-called “big five” personality traits. There is growing scientific consensus that every human personality is a unique mix of just five core attributes: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness/intellect, and conscientiousness. Every other character trait is subsumed under one of the big five—or its flip side.

These traits can be reliably measured using personality inventories, which DeYoung and Gray ran on more than a hundred volunteers in a recent study. Basic brain research has in recent years revealed a great deal about the purposes and functions of various brain regions, and the scientists drew upon these insights. They wanted to see if volunteers’ dominant personality traits matched up—in a way that makes sense—with the size (and presumably the power) of these clusters of neurons.

Take extraversion, for example. Extraversion includes qualities like assertiveness and sociability and talkativeness—all traits having to do with positive emotions and rewarding social experiences. Based on this, the scientists guessed that the most extraverted people would have larger than normal brain regions associated with sensitivity to reward. And when they used a MRI to measure the volume of the extraverted subjects’ brains, that is exactly what they found. As reported on-line in the journal Psychological Science, the regions known to be involved in the reward experience were noticeably larger.

Similarly, the scientists found that neuroticism—a tendency toward negative emotions like irritability and anxiety—was associated with the brain regions involved in threat and punishment. Agreeableness—a catchall for altruism, empathy, cooperation and compassion—correlated with regions known to process those traits. And, finally, the most conscientious volunteers had unusually large brain structures involved in “executive” powers like future planning and following complex rules. In short, the brain studies lent strong support to the idea that the big five personality traits have a biological foundation. Indeed, the only trait of the five that was not significantly linked to a particular region was openness/intellect, which is an umbrella for imagination and aesthetics and intelligence. Even here, there was some suggestive evidence linking this trait to the brain’s center for working memory and attention and reasoning.

Personality traits are reliable predictors of everything from health and well-being to career and relationship success. The most conscientious people, for instance, tend to be the healthiest, and to excel at school and work. So finding the biological roots of these individual differences would be an important advance. But having neurological roots does not mean that character is unchanging. That deterministic notion of the brain and personality has gone the way of phrenologists' bumpy heads.

Excerpts from “We’re Only Human” appear regularly in The Huffington Post and Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.

Copycats and Culture

Young kids have to figure out everything about the adult world. Think about it: They have no innate understanding of how to get peanut butter out of a jar, or how to switch to the cartoon channel, or how to tie a shoe. So they figure these things out mostly by watching others very closely—and aping what they see.

Well, not aping exactly. Apes imitate too, but they focus on the goal rather than the drill. Kids are high-fidelity copycats, precisely mimicking every adult action, including arbitrary and irrelevant and counterproductive actions. If an adult were to touch the peanut butter jar with his nose before twisting off the cap, a two-year-old would figure that’s the accepted way to open a peanut butter jar.

That doesn’t seem very efficient. What purpose could such mindless mimicry possibly serve? Is it just a maladaptive error of human evolution? Or is it perhaps a feature only of Western cultures, where doting parents tend to instruct their kids in very explicit ways?

Psychologists Mark Nielsen and Keyan Tomaselli favored the latter explanation—in part because over-imitation has only been observed in affluent urban cultures. What’s more, parents in many indigenous cultures are much more casual about instruction in basic life skills. They don’t spell everything out in detail. The scientists decided to test this idea by comparing kids in two very different cultures. Nielsen is a professor at the University of Queensland, Australia; Tomaselli, a professor at University of KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa. So they decided to test and compare kids in their own backyards.

They recruited a sample of kids from Brisbane, an industrial city of 2 million and capital of Queensland, and a sample from a remote Bushman community in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert. The kids were all between 2 and 6 years old—the age span during which over-imitation typically occurs. The kids were given various versions of a learning task, all of which went essentially like this: The kids were shown a box and a stick, and the goal was simply to open the box, as demonstrated by an adult. But the adults’ modeling varied. Sometimes the adult would open the box the most economical way possible, by simply pulling a knob, but other times the adult might use the stick to open the door. The stick worked okay, but it was unnecessary, and actually made the task a bit more difficult. Other times the adult rotated the stick three times before opening the box—an irrelevant action akin to putting your nose on the peanut butter jar. The idea was to see how precisely the kids from the two cultures mimicked the adults.

The findings were unambiguous, and not at all what Nielsen and Tomaselli had guessed. In short, the rural African kids and the urban Australian kids were indistinguishable. Both copied the irrelevant stick rotation when it was modeled, as if that was a perfectly normal step in the box-opening drill. And kids from both cultures were also equally likely—and more likely than controls—to use the stick for opening the box—if that’s what they saw the adult do. What’s more, the irrelevant and counterproductive movements were only replicated by kids who observed adults modeling the actions, never by kids left to their own devices. These findings suggest that the kids were intentionally (and uncritically) mimicking the adults, step by precise step.

They also suggest that high-fidelity copycatting is pervasive among young children, perhaps universal. But why? The scientists have a theory, which they describe on-line this week in the journal Psychological Science: When an adult models an action, kids assume that they’re supposed to learn something new; they see the modeling as purposeful. Eons of evolution have hard-wired this habit into the neurons—so it’s hard to be flexible, even when some of the actions are irrelevant.

But why has evolution hard-wired this habit of mind? Though it may seem maladaptive at first, it is quintessential to the creation and transmission of human culture, the scientists believe. They offer the example of meat: Knowing that a group cooks meat doesn’t tell us much about that group. There are hundreds of ways to prepare meat. Knowing how they cook meat says much more—that’s a hallmark of culture. Two-year-old copycats, in that sense, are simply in practice to be cultural beings.

Excerpts from "We're Only Human" appear regularly in The Huffington Post and Scientific American Mind. Wray Herbert’s book, On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits, will be published by Crown in September.