24th Jan 2016
Speaking in English: NYT & TED
The Joy of Psyching Myself Out­
By MARIA KONNIKOVAJAN. 9, 2016
IS it possible to think scientifically and creatively at once? Can you
be both a psychologist and a writer?
When you look at the world as a psychologist, you see it as a set of
phenomena that can be subjected to scientific inquiry: identified,
tested and either verified or discarded. When you look at the world
as a writer, you see it as a set of phenomena to be captured,
contemplated, transformed and set down for others to recognize
and absorb.
Although it’s often presented as a dichotomy (the apparent
subjectivity of the writer versus the seeming objectivity of the
psychologist), it need not be. In fact, as I realized when I left the
world of psychology behind to become that horror of all horrors (to
an academic psychologist) — someone who wrote for a general audience — that neat separation is not just
unwarranted; it’s destructive.
“A writer must be as objective as a chemist,” Anton Chekhov wrote in 1887. “He must abandon the
subjective line; he must know that dung heaps play a very reasonable part in a landscape.”
Chekhov’s chemist is a naturalist — someone who sees reality for what it is, rather than what it should
be. In that sense, the starting point of the psychologist and the writer is the same: a curiosity that leads
you to observe life in all its dimensions. Only in writing, you have the flexibility to explore the implications
of your observations without the immediate necessity of experimental design.
Depending on whom you ask, Sigmund Freud was either a pioneer who made much of modern psychology
possible or a villain who was wholly misguided. The same mind advanced the field in unanticipated ways
(Freud was decades ahead, for instance, when it came to defense mechanisms) and pushed it in a
direction that seems, at best, simplistic (his insistence on sexuality as the cause of everything led to a
number of therapies with little empirical grounding that are still in use to this day). How is that possible?
At the turn of the century, psychology was a field quite unlike what it is now. The theoretical musings of
William James were the norm (a wry commenter once noted that William James was the writer, and his
brother Henry, the psychologist). Psychologists could theorize without the immediate need for
quantification, although in James’s case he did establish one of the first psychological laboratories in the
United States. Freud was a breed of psychologist that hardly exists anymore: someone who saw the world
as both writer and psychologist, and for whom there was no conflict between the two. That boundary
melding allowed him to posit the existence of cognitive mechanisms that wouldn’t be empirically
proved for decades, but it also led him astray in problematic, ultimately hurtful ways.
Freud got it brilliantly right and brilliantly wrong. The rightness is as good a justification as any of the
benefits, the necessity even, of knowing how to look through the eyes of a writer. The wrongness is part of
the reason that the distinction between writing and experimental psychology has grown far more rigid
than it was a century ago.
When I was working on my new book, I discovered a pervasive set of folk theories about liars. Most were
not as extreme as the profile of a poisoner from a 900 B.C. Vedic papyrus I chanced upon — “He does not
answer questions, or gives evasive answers; he speaks nonsense, rubs the great toe along the ground, and
shivers; his face is discolored; he rubs the roots of his hair with his fingers” — but they did include a
number of strands that will be familiar to any aficionado of the police procedural.
I
24th Jan 2016
Speaking in English: NYT & TED
When an international team of researchers asked some 2,300 people in 58 countries to respond to a single
question — “How can you tell when people are lying?” — one sign stood out: In two-thirds of responses,
people listed gaze aversion. A liar doesn’t look you in the eye. Twenty-eight percent reported that liars
seemed nervous, a quarter reported incoherence, and another quarter that liars exhibited certain little
giveaway motions.
It just so happens that the common wisdom is false — and we need psychologists in order to make that
determination. What researchers who study ways of detecting deception, like Leanne ten Brinke, a
psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, will tell you is that the signs people associate with
liars often have little empirical evidence to support them. Therein lies the psychologist’s distinct role and
her necessity. As a writer, you look in order to describe, but you remain free to use that description
however you see fit. As a psychologist, you look to describe, yes, but also to verify.
Without verification, we can’t always trust what we see — or rather, what we think we see. Whether we’re
psychologists or writers (or anything else), our eyes are never the impartial eyes of Chekhov’s chemist.
Our expectations, our wants and shoulds, get in the way. Take, once again, lying. Why do we think we
know how liars behave? Liars should divert their eyes. They should feel ashamed and guilty and show the
signs of discomfort that such feelings engender. And because they should, we think they do.
The desire for the world to be what it ought to be and not what it is permeates experimental psychology
as much as writing, though. There’s experimental bias and the problem known in the field as “demand
characteristics” — when researchers end up finding what they want to find by cuing participants to act a
certain way. It’s also visible when psychologists choose to study one thing rather than another, dismiss
evidence that doesn’t mesh with their worldview while embracing that which does. The subjectivity we
tend to associate with the writerly way of looking may simply be more visible in that realm rather than
exclusive to it.
IN 1932, when he was in his 70s, Freud gave a series of lectures on psychoanalysis. In his final talk, “A
Philosophy of Life,” he focused on clarifying an important caveat to his research: His followers should
not be confused by the seemingly internal, and thus possibly subjective, nature of his work. “There is no
other source of knowledge of the universe but the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified
observations,” he said.
Intuition and inspiration, he went on, “can safely be counted as illusions, as fulfillments of wishes.” They
are not to be relied on as evidence of any sort. “Science takes account of the fact that the mind of man
creates such demands and is ready to trace their source, but it has not the slightest ground for thinking
them justified.” Freud may have looked as a writer, but as a psychologist he had learned to distrust what
he saw.
That is what both the psychologist and the writer should strive for: a self-knowledge that allows you to
look in order to discover, without agenda, without preconception, without knowing or caring if what
you’re seeing is wrong or right in your scheme of the world. It’s harder than it sounds. For one thing, you
have to possess the self-knowledge that will allow you to admit when you’re wrong.
Even with the best intentions, objectivity can prove a difficult companion. I left psychology behind
because I found its structural demands overly hampering. I couldn’t just pursue interesting lines of
inquiry; I had to devise a set of experiments, see how feasible they were, both technically and financially,
consider how they would reflect on my career. That meant that most new inquiries never happened — in a
sense, it meant that objectivity was more an ideal than a reality. Each study was selected for a reason
other than intrinsic interest.
I became a writer to pursue that intrinsic interest. But I do so having never quite left the thinking of the
psychologist behind: I still design studies in my head, think through implications, attempt to apply an
experimental rigor to even the most creative of my writing. Perhaps it’s the combination that brings me
closer to my ideal of observation. Isolation precludes objectivity. It’s in the merging not simply of ways
of seeing but also of modes of thought that a truly whole perception of reality may eventually emerge. Or
at least that way we can realize its ultimate impossibility — and that’s not nothing, either.
II
24th Jan 2016
Speaking in English: NYT & TED
Discussion guide
1.
For your better understanding of this article: (you can skip this if it takes too long)
a. What is dichotomy between writer and psychologist represented by the author?
b. How is Sigmund Freud evaluated by the author as a writer and a psychologist?
c. What does it mean by “It just so happens that the common wisdom is false — and we need
psychologists in order to make that determination.”?
d. Is it possible to be entirely objective for psychologist according to this article? Why/Why
not?
e. What do we need to have to determine what’s right and wrong without any or less
preconceptions?
2. Do you agree with the following statement? Why/Why not?
It just so happens that the common wisdom is false — and we need psychologists in order to
make that determination.
3. The followings are examples of conventional wisdom that have proven wrong.
● The earth is the center of the universe.
● I think there might be a world market for maybe five computers (Thomas Watson,
Chairman of IBM, 1965)
● The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would you pay for a
message sent to nobody in particular? (Associate of NBC president David Sharnoff
responding to his recommendation in the 1920’ that they invest in radio)
Do you agree/disagree with the following statements? Why? Do we have any proof?
● No pains, No gains.
● Out of sight, Out of mind.
● The early bird catches the worm.
● God helps those who help themselves.
What are conventional wisdoms you know of? Would you agree with them? Why/Why not?
4. How is “insight” difference from common wisdom?
5. Have you ever made a quick judgement based on conventional wisdom (i.e., without thinking
enough or any evidence)? What are they? Were your decisions right?
6. Why do you think people are prone to leaning on conventional wisdom? Do you think it is right or
wrong? Why? What would be pros and cons of conventional wisdom?
7. Why do we need to have self-knowledge according to this article to avoid preconceptions? What
are ways to have it?
III
24th Jan 2016
Speaking in English: NYT & TED
You Don’t Need More Free Time
By CRISTOBAL YOUNG JAN. 8, 2016
AMERICANS work some of the longest hours in the Western
world, and many struggle to achieve a healthy balance between
work and life. As a result, there is an understandable tendency
to assume that the problem we face is one of quantity: We
simply do not have enough free time. “If I could just get a few
more hours off work each week,” you might think, “I would be
happier.”
This may be true. But the situation, I believe, is more
complicated than that. As I discovered in a study that I published
with my colleague Chaeyoon Lim in the journal Sociological
Science, it’s not just that we have a shortage of free time; it’s also
that our free time, in order to be satisfying, often must align with
that of our friends and loved ones. We face a problem, in other
words, of coordination. Work-life balance is not something that
you can solve on your own.
Our study, which drew on data from more than 500,000
respondents to the Gallup Daily Poll, examined the day-to-day
fluctuations and patterns in people’s emotions, week after week.
Two facts about emotional well-being emerged — one that was
intuitive, the other surprising.
The intuitive finding was that people’s feelings of well-being closely tracked the workweek. As measured
by things such as anxiety, stress, laughter and enjoyment, our well-being is lowest Monday through
Thursday. The workweek is a slog. Well-being edges up on Friday, and really peaks on Saturday and
Sunday. We are, in a real sense, living for the weekend.
The surprising finding was that this is also true of unemployed people. We found that the jobless showed
almost exactly the same day-to-day pattern in emotional well-being as working people did. Their positive
emotions soared on the weekend, and dropped back down again on Monday.
It seems obvious why working people cherish the weekend: It’s a respite from work. But why is the
weekend also so important to the unemployed?
The key to answering this question is to recognize that not all time is equal. Time is, in many ways, what
sociologists call a “network good.”
Network goods are things that derive their value from being widely shared. Take your computer: Its value
depends in large measure on how many other people also have a computer. This is because you use
your computer as, among other things, a communication technology: for Internet access, email, Facebook
and file sharing. When everyone you know has a computer, the technology is indispensable. But if you
were the only person with a computer, its value would be limited.
Free time is also a network good. The weekend derives much of its importance from the fact that so many
people are off work together.
To help demonstrate this, my colleague and I conducted a second study, this time using the American
Time Use Survey, which tracks how much time people spend doing various activities. We found that the
weekly cycle in well-being from our previous study was mirrored in the pattern of time that people spent
with family and friends — which was roughly double on weekends what it was during the week. According
to our calculations, this increase of social time on the weekend accounted for roughly half the spike in
weekend well-being.
IV
24th Jan 2016
Speaking in English: NYT & TED
Again, this was the same for the jobless. Monday to Friday offers five days when the unemployed are off
work by themselves, searching job ads, doing household chores and so on. While the jobless have “free
time” during the week, their friends and family still have to go to work. The weekend is when the jobless
fall back into sync with society.
The weekend, then, is not just a respite from work, but also gives similar relief from unemployment. It is a
time when people can get what they’ve been missing: time together.
This conclusion points to a key feature of the work-life problem: You cannot get more “weekend” simply
by taking an extra day off work yourself. If we were to take more time off as individuals, we would be
likely to spend that time, as the jobless do, waiting for other people to finish work. We are stuck “at work,”
in a sense, by the work schedules of our family and friends.
Over the past few years, many workplaces have looked for ways to create more flexibility in individual
work schedules. There is no question that doing so has many benefits. But my research suggests that a
disadvantage of these efforts is that they may lead us even further from a weekend-like system of
coordinated social time. They threaten, ultimately, to exacerbate the decline in civic engagement and
social contact known as the “bowling alone” problem.
The solution might be found in a form of constraint: more standardization of the time for work and the
time for life.
Discussion Guide
1. What do you do in your free time? How do you spend your weekends?
2. Do you agree with the following statement? Why/Why not?
“If I could just get a few more hours off work each week,” you might think, “I would be
happier.”
3. According to this article, “The workweek is a slog. Well-being edges up on Friday, and really peaks
on Saturday and Sunday.” Do you agree/disagree? Which date do you feel happy most during the
week? Why?
4. Have you ever spent weekends by yourself? How was it? How would it be if you have to spend
every weekends by yourself? Do you agree that social life makes us happier? Why/Why not?
5. Have you ever seen a workaholic? What do you think of them? Do you think they are not happy?
Why/Why not?
6. Who would you choose for your partner (in business/for marriage)? Why?
a. I really love my work. So, I want to put most of my efforts and time on it.
b. I want to spend more time with my family so I’d work less.
TO a participant who has picked ‘b’,
What if the ‘a’ person will be able to reach high status figure in his company or in your country as
a result of his/her hard work, wouldn’t you be happier too?
7. Why is it important to maintain work-life balance? What do you do for work-life balance?
8. Let’s say you find something that you can be very passionate with so you will put all of your
energy on it. Would you still take the work-life balance into account? Or should it be seen from
somewhat different aspects?
V