Fear gets a bad rap. It’s a so-called negative emotion, one that supposedly stands between us and our dreams. It is certainly true that pure fear doesn’t feel good, but that is the whole point of the emotion. Fear tells us to get the hell out of Dodge because Dodge is a bad place. Fear evolved over millions of years to protect us from danger. So, yes, a feel-bad emotion, but also, and perhaps paradoxically, the engine in a whole range of pleasurable activities and behaviors—which inspire what we can call recreational fear.

Once you start looking for it, you’ll find recreational fear everywhere. From a very early age, humans love being jump-scared by caregivers in the form of peek-a-boo, and being hurtled into the air (and caught). They get older and take great pleasure in chase play and hide-and-seek. They are drawn to scary stories about monsters and witches and ghosts. They perform daredevil tricks on playgrounds and race their bikes toward what, from a parent’s perspective, is certain and violent death. A little older and they get together for horror movie nights, stand patiently in line for roller coasters, and play horror video games. Indeed, most of us never quite lose our peculiar attraction to recreational fear—even if we eschew slasher flicks or dark crime shows brimming with murder, death, and gore.

So even though Dodge may be a bad place, we still keep visiting it, at least from the safe distance of play and make-believe. How come?

One hypothesis is that recreational fear is a form of play behavior, which is widespread in the animal kingdom and ubiquitous among humans. When an organism plays, it learns important skills and develops strategies for survival. Playfighting kittens train their ability to hold their own in a hostile encounter, but with little risk and low cost, compared to the real thing. Same with humans. When we play, we learn important things about the physical and social world, and about our own inner world. When we engage in recreational fear activities specifically, from peek-a-boo to horror movie watching, we play with fear, challenge our limits, and learn about our own physiological and psychological responses to stress. In other words, recreational fear might actually be good for us.

To investigate whether that is indeed the case and why, my colleagues and I have established the Recreational Fear Lab, a research center at Aarhus University, Denmark. We do lab studies, survey studies, and real-world empirical studies to understand this widespread but scientifically understudied psychological phenomenon.

The Recreational Fear Lab conducts investigations to understand the scientifically understudied phenomenon of fear—and why it might actually be good for us. Courtesy of author.

In one ambitious research project, led by my colleague Marc Malmdorf Andersen, we set out to investigate the experiences of guests at a very frightening haunted house—Dystopia Haunted House in Denmark. We mounted surveillance cameras in the house’s scariest rooms, strapped participants with heart rate monitors, and distributed a bunch of questionnaires. The surveillance footage allowed us to see how guests responded to frightening events, such as a chainsaw-wielding pig-man chasing them down a dark corridor. The heart rate monitors told us about their physiological responses to such events, and the questionnaires allowed us to understand how they felt about it all.

They told us they perceived their experiences as a kind of play, supporting our notion of recreational horror as a medium for playing with fear. But we also wanted to go deeper into the relationship between fear and enjoyment. You might think that relationship is linear—the more fear, the better. But when we plotted the actual relationship between fear and enjoyment, it looked like an upside-down U. In other words, when people go to a haunted attraction, they don’t want too little fear (which is boring), and they don’t want too much fear (which is unpleasant). What they want is to hit what we call the “sweet spot of fear.” That doesn’t just go for high-intensity haunted attractions either. When you hurtle a kid into the air, you don’t want it to be too tame or too wild; when teenagers joyride their bikes, they need just the right amount of tummy-tickling arousal; when you pick a horror movie on Netflix, you try to go for the one that sits just at the right point on the scare-o-meter.

So, there is pleasure to be had from these vicarious visits to Dodge, but are there any other benefits? In several past and ongoing studies of the psychological and social effects of engagement with recreational fear, we’ve seen it improve people’s ability to cope with stress and anxiety. For instance, one study—led by my colleague Coltan Scrivner—found that people who watch many horror movies exhibited better psychological resilience during the first COVID-19 lockdown than people who stay away from scary movies. Presumably, the horror hounds have trained their ability to regulate their own fear from playing with it. We know from another Dystopia Haunted House study that people actively use a range of coping strategies to regulate their fear levels in pursuit of the sweet spot, and it makes sense that we get better at using those strategies through practice.

You can think of recreational fear as a kind of mental jungle gym where you prepare for the real thing, or as a kind of fear inoculation. A small dose of fear galvanizes the organism for the big dose that life throws at it sooner or later. So even though fear itself may be unpleasant, recreational fear is not only fun—it may be good for us. My colleagues and I even have preliminary results to suggest that some people with mental health issues, such as anxiety disorder and depression, get relief from recreational horror. Maybe it’s about escaping anhedonia—emotional flatlining—momentarily, and maybe it’s about playing with troublesome emotions in a controllable context. For fear to be fun, you need to feel not only that the levels are just-so, but that you are in relative control of the experience.

With research findings such as these in mind, we should maybe think twice about shielding kids and young people too zealously from playful forms of fear. They’ll end up in Dodge sooner or later, and they will be better equipped if they’ve at least pretended to be there before.

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And yet: many are largely disconnected from the pain, unwilling or unable to recognize or process the loss.

Where is the collective mourning? I am an empathy scientist, and I can report that we are not a nation of psychopaths. People have a limited capacity to process mass suffering, rather than a callous lack of care. Cognitive biases—common errors in thinking—make it difficult to process tragedy of this scale over time, creating a sense of psychological distance between us and the number of COVID-19 deaths. By understanding how various cognitive biases work, however, people can train themselves to feel the weight of our country’s losses again.

Several types of cognitive bias are warping Americans’ ability to process COVID today. First is the numeracy bias, the brain’s inability to wrap itself around large numbers. I logged onto Facebook recently and was saddened by a message from one of my friends announcing the death of his cousin from COVID-19. My friend wrote that behind every statistic, there is a person and a family—and that this time, it was him. He was echoing a popular quote: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” which has been attributed to Stalin. The quote demonstrates something that scientists have long known. We can easily feel empathy for specific individuals, especially those who are close to us. But as these individuals turn into groups, our empathy is diminished. Their suffering becomes more emotionally distant and abstract, and turns into a statistic. And people are not good at reasoning about statistics.

We don’t like to think of ourselves in this cold way. In studies, participants predict that they would feel worse if thousands of people were victims of a tragedy, compared to only a few. That reaction, they feel, is the morally right response. But in reality, most of us experience an “emotional flatline,” with no greater feelings of sadness as the death toll from a tragedy grows—as long as we are not personally affected.

Paul Slovic, a leading researcher on numeracy bias, writes, “Just as we don’t notice the difference between 30 lit candles and 31 lit candles, our feelings do not register the difference between 30 deaths and 31 deaths.” In typical numeracy bias studies, some participants read a passage about an individual victim (“Rokia, a 7-year-old girl facing starvation,” for instance), while other participants read about an unnamed group of children, experiencing the same tragedy. When asked to donate money to help, study participants who read about the single victim are more likely to give than those who read about the group. In one study, Slovic found that even moving from one to two victims reduced emotional responses and donations.

Another cognitive bias at work during the COVID crisis is the ostrich effect: people’s tendency to avoid negative information, including everything from bad financial returns to another person’s misery. Daryl Cameron is a scientist at Pennsylvania State University who studies compassion avoidance. In his studies, he shows participants pictures of distressed people, such as refugees. Immediately afterward, participants can then choose to “try to feel what the person feels” and “empathically share in the internal emotional experience of the person,” or they can choose to simply describe external details about the picture, such as the person’s age and gender. Participants choose empathy only 36 percent of the time. Cameron’s research shows that people actively try to suppress their emotions to avoid feeling overwhelmed in the face of mass tragedy. Sometimes it’s easier to avert our eyes in the face of others’ pain.

This may be because of a sense of helplessness, common in the face of mass tragedy. Even if we want to help, our actions never seem to be enough. In “The Eleventh,” the classic short story by Henri Barbusse, a servant invites 10 people into his master’s palace-hospital each month, but has to turn away the 11th. At first, he enjoys being able to help the 10, but soon closing the door on the 11th person becomes torturous. This story highlights the dangers of becoming overwhelmed by those we cannot help, rather than focusing on those we can.

Time messes with our concrete sensory brains, too. The recency effect creates a crippling nearsightedness, where events that are closer to the present are more vivid in our imaginations. A process called hedonic adaptation numbs us to the pandemic’s rise over time, as one death per day becomes 10 deaths per day, then 50, then 500, then 1,000, then 2,000. While COVID seemed to have taken over our lives very quickly, the number of deaths accelerated and then crept up or down subtly over weeks and months, giving people time to get used to the new normal, and dulling their emotional response.

Vivid experiences can skew perception by activating a type of cognitive bias known as the availability heuristic, the tendency to overestimate the prevalence of events that more easily come to mind. This type of bias is the reason people worry about airplane crashes and terrorist attacks, which generate countless dramatic news clips that make them easy to picture, despite the fact that they are rare and are not among the top causes of death in the US. According to a survey from late August, 27 percent of Americans said that a close friend or family member had tested positive for COVID-19, and 15 percent said that a close friend or family member had died from it. Despite our lives having drastically changed as the summer drew to a close, the vast majority of Americans still had no personal experience with the virus. Yet COVID-19 is now third leading cause of death in the US—after heart disease and cancer. Although statistics clearly demonstrate that the illness is dangerous and deadly, the availability heuristic makes us underestimate the likelihood of events that are not easily available in memory. Since those of us without vivid personal experiences with COVID mainly experience it through statistics in the news, we downplay its seriousness.

So what can we do to counter these deeply ingrained patterns of thinking, and become more sensitive to mass suffering?

To combat numeracy bias, some might suggest thinking more logically would be the solution. Yet, research finds that logical thinking can actually backfire: When it comes to charitable donations, for instance, people driven by logic often realize that giving to individual victims is an emotional response that doesn’t really make sense. A better approach involves expanding one’s sense of compassion so that we can apply it to more than one individual at a time. Some people are better at this than others. For example, those who feel secure in their relationships with others show less numeracy bias. They do not need to know someone’s name or see a picture to understand that a tragedy is a tragedy—even when it affects a group. For more insecure people, thinking of someone (whether a person, an animal, or a deity) who loves them unconditionally can help them extend more compassion to the world, even when events are remote and actors are anonymous.

A procession of vehicles drive past photos of Detroit victims of COVID-19, Monday, Aug. 31, 2020 on Belle Isle in Detroit. Courtesy of Carlos Osorio/Associated Press.

Some studies have found that people who have experienced adversity are less likely to show the numeracy bias, and actually feel more compassion for groups, compared to individuals. Shifting into a more interdependent frame of mind can also help people resist the numeracy bias. Focusing on “we-ness”— the simple act of thinking about what you have in common with others—can increase this mindset. Another realistic response is to simply accept that numeracy bias is a part of how our brains work, and focus on individual victims instead of large groups. Public memorials can be helpful for this. At the end of May, when the country reached 100,000 deaths, the entire front page of the New York Times was a list of names, ages, locations, and short descriptions of individuals who had died. It was hard not to be moved; I still think of Rodrick “Rod” Samuels, 49, who “never let anyone mess with his younger brother.” Matching names to faces is also important. One study found that people no longer showed numeracy bias—that is, their feelings of empathic sadness increased along with the number of victims—when they could see pictures of the people affected. The city of Detroit, which lost more than 1,500 people to COVID-19, created a public drive-by memorial in Belle Isle Park with hundreds of portraits and names of victims.

As for the ostrich effect, feelings of helplessness at the scope of suffering can prevent us from acting, but they don’t have to. There are some people who deliberately seek out others in need. These highly empathic people aren’t superheroes or saints, but instead, expect that helping others will feel good. And plenty of research supports this idea, finding that those who feel a sense of efficacy—that they can do small things to help—don’t get as overwhelmed. Such efforts don’t have to be heroic or costly. In the case of the pandemic, we can save lives by hand washing, mask wearing, and social distancing. Focusing on these concrete ways that we can make a difference can help people feel less overwhelmed.

To regain initial sensitivity to the pandemic and combat hedonic adaptation, we can try to mindfully accept negative information. Instead of focusing on the number of deaths yesterday, we can compare today’s total number of deaths—more than 277,000—to the end of February’s—one death—or the first day of Fall—201,000. The contrast may feel more appropriately shocking when tracked this way. And to counter the availability heuristic and make the pandemic’s effects seem more real, we can peruse our social media with renewed focus. Sharing personal experiences with COVID online may be one of the best means available, at the moment, for painting a vivid portrait of the disease—and encouraging people to take CDC-recommended precautions.

Cognitive biases may psychologically minimize the scope of the pandemic, but there are small steps that we can each take to actually minimize the scope of it. Mother Teresa had some sage advice on this front: “Never worry about numbers. Help one person at a time and always start with the person nearest you.” By wearing a mask, washing your hands, staying home whenever possible, and otherwise socially distancing, you are doing just that.

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But there’s good news. While the COVID-19 pandemic may be unprecedented by many measures, the same combination of uncertainty and loss of control it’s triggering is a close psychological cousin to the waiting periods I’ve been studying my entire career. And the insights I’ve gleaned from nearly two decades of research can illuminate the nature of our current psychological predicament and point toward a happier kind of coping.

In my field of psychological research, I study stressful uncertainty, particularly the kind of uncertainty that arises as we wait for an unknown, but anticipated, outcome. I’ve turned the experience of waiting inside out, seeking to understand every facet of this common and distressing psychological state. I’ve studied soon-to-be lawyers waiting to learn if they passed the bar exam, students waiting to learn their grade on a class assignment, researchers waiting to learn if their paper will be published or their grant funded, patients waiting to learn if they have cancer, and voters waiting to learn if their preferred candidate will be elected to office.

The waiting periods I study vary in a number of ways. Some are life-changing, like waiting for a biopsy result. Others are minor bumps in life’s long road, like waiting for a grade on a book report. Some entail waiting many months for important news, others require a wait of just hours or days. In some cases, the waiting period has a definitive end; exam scores are posted online, or a doctor’s appointment reveals a diagnosis. In the case of COVID-19, the wait is open-ended, with no clear end in sight.

Despite these differences, my research has uncovered two features that nearly all waiting periods have in common: uncertainty (we don’t know what’s coming), and loss of control (we can’t do much about it). Both play a central role in why the act of waiting is so challenging. While either of these states is existentially uncomfortable even on its own (after all, survival requires an ability to anticipate future threats and opportunities, as well as an ability to direct one’s fate), together, they make for a fearsome duo—so fearsome, in fact, that many people prefer to get bad news than to remain in limbo.

The stress brought on by COVID can be characterized by that same combination of uncertainty and loss of control. Back in February, my fellow collaborators and I surveyed more than 6,000 people in multiple cities in China, when the virus was at its peak there. Hoping to get a snapshot of how people were feeling and coping during this unprecedented period, we asked participants lots of questions about their physical and psychological well-being—how they were coping, their personality, and their circumstances (for example, whether they were in quarantine). As expected, people who were most uncertain about their risk of contracting the virus and felt that they had little control over their risk were the worst off in terms of well-being. They were more anxious, depressed, and lonely than their counterparts who felt more certain or more in control. They also reported more unhealthy behaviors, like binge drinking and eating junk food.

Waiting is so difficult in part because time seems to slow down when someone is worried about the future, which has the effect of prolonging their uncertainty (at least in their mind). Surely everyone has experienced how time can expand and contract, such that an hour feels like mere minutes during pleasant activities, and a minute can feel like an hour during unpleasant ones. Although this process isn’t fully understood, it seems that we’re prone to missing the “ticks” of our internal clock when we’re pleasantly distracted. In contrast, stress makes the clock seem to accelerate, which accumulates more “ticks” and thus extends the apparent passage of time.

Several studies from my lab show that this “slow time” may actually exacerbate anxiety and other forms of emotional distress. We surveyed, for instance, law school graduates awaiting their bar exam result and college students awaiting an exam grade. In both studies, we repeatedly asked participants whether it felt like it was “taking forever” to get their exam result or if they felt like they would learn the result “before [they knew] it.” We also asked how they were feeling, both physically and emotionally. When we linked up these various measures, it was clear that people who felt worse also felt like time was moving more slowly, and people who felt like time was moving more slowly felt worse.

This reciprocal relationship can create a downward spiral. Worrying makes the days feel longer; the tedium of seemingly endless days ramps up anxiety. In short, if you feel like it’s been an eternity since you first heard the term “COVID-19,” there’s a good reason for that, particularly if you find yourself worrying a lot about the future.

Waiting periods don’t just affect your emotional health; they can affect your physical health as well. In research I conducted with psychologist Jennifer Howell, we found that people felt sicker and slept worse during the most worrisome moments of a waiting period. In the same group of law school graduates who helped us understand the dynamics of time perception during waiting periods, we also asked about their “subjective” health (how sick or healthy they felt) and how well they were sleeping. When we linked up these variables, we found that people reported feeling sickest and sleeping the worst during weeks in which they were particularly worried about their exam results.

Several other studies, including our recent survey in China during COVID-19, provide a clue as to why health suffers during these periods: People do not cope well with the emotional and physical strain of uncertainty. There’s a good reason a common theme among COVID-19 memes has been a reference to gaining the “quaran-fifteen”: people are eating worse and consuming more alcohol than they would during regular periods of stress.

Humans are equipped with a rich array of well-learned coping strategies that are quite effective in some stressful situations. These strategies, sometimes shorthanded as the “psychological immune system,” highlight that humans are quite capable of combatting and even neutralizing threats to their emotional health. We rationalize the bad things that come our way, telling ourselves “it’s not me, it’s them” when someone hurts our feelings, or “they don’t know what they’re talking about” when we get a bad performance review. But without a clear sense of what threats lie ahead, the psychological immune system has no clear target to attack. You can’t fight an illness that you don’t yet have, metaphorically speaking.

While the challenge of coping well with uncertainty is formidable, research from my lab has already identified an entire toolkit of strategies that may be effective during such periods, including mindfulness meditation, experiences of awe, and positive fantasies about the future. Notably, our COVID-19 survey in China suggests one particularly promising pathway to well-being during the quarantine-like conditions that are the norm in many parts of the world right now: flow.

Flow, it seems, might hold the key to making various forms of self-isolation more tolerable, offering us enough of a pleasant distraction to miss those “ticks” of our internal clock. People most commonly experience this state of complete absorption during activities that are appropriately challenging (not too hard, not too easy) and provide opportunities to track their progress. Video games, for instance, are custom-made to create flow, but people also experience flow while gardening, cooking, playing sports, even working; the best flow activities differ for each person.

In our study, we asked people whether they had been experiencing flow during the previous week. Those who reported experiencing a lot of it also reported feeling better on nearly every measure of well-being: less anxious, less depressed, less lonely, and so forth. More importantly, those in quarantine (about 30 percent of our participants) reported feeling almost as good as those not in quarantine when they experienced a lot of flow.

We may be stuck with COVID-19’s pandemic of uncertainty for months or even years to come. But at least by understanding what the virus has unleashed on our pandemic-era brains, science can point the way toward how to make this waiting period feel more manageable. Because equipping ourselves with effective coping strategies is crucial for surviving—and perhaps even thriving—during this time.

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It was late March, early in the pandemic, and tests were scarce across the United States. But there had been an outbreak on his floor. One resident had died already. The medical and scientific community still knew little about the disease.

I liked his caretakers. They’d called him Dr. Kurt and showered him with song and touch, even though his Alzheimer’s disease had advanced to a phase where he couldn’t say anything but “yes,” “no,” and “stop it,” much less know what kind of doctorate he held.

But our relationship with the facility had gone to hell when the pandemic hit. They’d failed to tell me and my family that we’d been exposed when we visited. They’d waited several days after the first staff member was diagnosed to email families. They’d ignored my attempts to find tests and protective personal equipment for my father and other residents.

So, against their wishes, I demanded a posthumous test.

Over the next few days, my family and I were told a lot of things. Massachusetts said it was our legal duty to get him a test, both to track the outbreak and to protect the other people at his facility. The Boston Public Health Commission said that under no circumstance could he get a test because there were not enough, and living people needed the tests more than him. We even received notification that he was turned down for hospice because, when evaluated the day before his death, he’d been “too healthy.”

But simmering underneath almost every conversation was a sentiment I heard out loud from one man at the Boston Public Health Commission. “With all due respect,” he said, “he’s passed either way.”

It still mattered, I thought but didn’t say. My dad, by many accounts a “scholarly giant” in the fields of developmental psychology and education, had lived his life devoted to scientific ways of thinking, so much so that he thought quoting research studies at me would persuade me to behave as a teen. To him, a lack of structured curiosity would not just lead to moral and scientific ruin; it was also a sign of disrespect. So during all of the bureaucratic conversations I had after his death, I could hear his voice, being the scientist that he was, insisting on learning the why and the how.

Courtesy of Seth Fischer.

Though I knew he was a successful academic, I knew little about the specifics of his research until I heard his colleagues speak at his retirement colloquium, after his Alzheimer’s disease had made it too late for him to discuss it. Thankfully, about a year before he died, I had the chance to excavate his basement office in my childhood home just outside Cambridge. It was a place he had forbidden me from entering as a kid, but now, it was mine.

I breathed in mold and papers that had spent decades wallowing in his colleagues’ cigarette smoke. Dozens of boxes filled with typewritten and dot-matrix paper were balanced awkwardly around the room.

Maybe here I could get some answers about who he was. We weren’t estranged, but he was the kind of dad who, when we had a disagreement, would tell me, “That’s typical for someone your age”—even when I was 7. This approach to fatherhood, coupled with the disaster that is modern masculinity and a fight when I was 15 over my parents’ custody agreement, had made us near-strangers who also loved each other more than anything. I can’t think of a single time as an adult, pre-Alzheimer’s, when we both acted authentically in a room together.

I was fascinated by his professional legacy. He consulted with everyone from Pope John Paul II to Sesame Street to the Chinese government. His colleagues at the Harvard Ed School, where he taught for 27 years, told me his research had improved the lives of thousands, if not millions, of students and educators. He did this in part by creating “dynamic skill theory,” which argued that human development was a complex and dynamic interaction between culture, context, and child.

This was and is a revolutionary idea because it implies that we are all complex individuals with different trajectories. Many other theoretical frameworks are built around the “normal” person, focus on “teaching to the mean” or average student, and can sometimes lead to punishment, neglect, or other less-than-ideal results for people who develop differently or in ways we don’t understand. He urged, instead, innovation and a respect for complexity. One of his mantras was, “Explain variation. Don’t explain it away.”

He also co-created the journal Mind, Brain, and Education and its entire field of study, bringing together educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, and others—a tough sell in the rather siloed corridors of academia at the time. After speaking with his students, I learned that one of his core beliefs was that children, educators, and scientists of all kinds are important to understanding development, no matter how different their perspectives. And he fiercely believed that we could all change the world if we respected each other and worked together.

It’s astonishing to learn how much he accomplished and grew, especially after reading the Frodi journals I found in his basement.

When my dad was in graduate school in developmental psychology, his professor encouraged each of his students to get a rhesus monkey, raise it, and take notes to better understand its development. My dad was the only one in his class to do so. When he found one, he named it Frodo, then renamed it Frodi when he realized she was a girl, and moved her into his tiny Cambridge apartment in May 1966.

In the year or so he lived with Frodi, he filled two notebooks with handwritten notes. Many revolve around my dad’s quest to make her stop peeing on him in the shower. At one point, he took her through Grand Central Station during rush hour, and, not surprisingly, she made more noise than he wished.

But what is most intriguing about these notes is the tone.

“Two things have been salient, especially about her recent behavior to strangers. She has reacted especially warmly to a few stranger girls or women, but has begun to show threat gestures to some other strangers, especially when they poke at her.”

The language and content are absurd. Does anyone like to be poked? Is it not obvious to him that Frodi might be taking cues from his body language, rather than reacting to the gender of human strangers? How could he pretend to write in the language of an impartial scientific observer when he is so clearly a part of what is happening? How could he be so bad at listening?

I chuckled and put them aside. Fine, I thought. He was only 23.

But then, in the next box over, I found something more disturbing: a black, 11-inch-by-13-inch three-ring binder from when he was in his late 30s. I looked inside. My name was everywhere. These notes were just like the ones he’d taken on Frodi, but they were all about me. What’s more, he’d convinced my mom, another psychologist who had once been a student of his, to take notes, too.

Courtesy of Seth Fischer.

The first page I read held notes on an experiment: He picked up a pacifier and kept it always just out of my reach, to see if I moved my hand to grab it. Then he repeated it with my stuffed Woodstock. He changed the position eight times. By his account, I “continued to try to grasp it,” he wrote, “but the grasp continued to be awkward.”

The notes have the same frigid, judgmental tone as the journals about Frodi. I pass and fail. I’m awkward or successful. In the most disturbing of these experiments, my parents repeatedly sat me in front of a mirror and tried to get me to pass something called the “rouge test,” which measures self-awareness by putting rouge on a kid’s nose and testing whether they touch their own nose or the mirror. At first, they just wanted me to sit there, to get me used to it, starting at about six months. Then, a couple months in, they started the tests.

I resisted this experiment more than any of the others, but they kept making me stare at myself, no matter how much I cried. The number of attempts each time, over a period of seven months, is put in terms of n: “N=8.” “N=12.” “N=3.” It was never clear what counted as a full attempt. I can only guess that each “attempt” meant they persisted until I became so frustrated they had to stop.

Finding these made me wonder if he ever thought of me as a person, or if he thought of me only as a test subject. They made me wonder if he knew how to love.

But then, under the folder, I found hundreds of pages of my childhood drawings. Then I found another box full of my art. Then another.

The art was uninspired, of course, even for a kid my age. Red and orange and green and blue blobs. When I got slightly older, a blobby stick figure, or a blobby house, or a blobby sun. I was not a gifted artist. Still, each one of them was marked with my name and the date, as if they were intended for a future research project.

Or was it because he cared about me?

Maybe, I thought, it was both.

On my father’s death certificate, the doctors listed four primary causes of death: probable aspiration, dysphagia (difficulty swallowing), Alzheimer’s disease, and adult failure to thrive.

“Adult failure to thrive” is a common cause of death for Alzheimer’s patients, because there is no good scientific way to say that everything kind of stopped working.

Courtesy of Seth Fischer.

Reading these four words, I recognized the same language he’d used in his notes on Frodi and me: cold, judgmental—and morbidly funny. This is the nature of so much of the language of medicine and science. It is used, I assume, in service to objectivity, but it makes scientists and doctors seem more obtuse than objective. Science’s fundamental impulse, we hope, is to better humanity, but it often forgets that the way it answers our most important questions matters.

My dad took notes on me because he was curious, and because he believed that the best way to love me was to study me. This also meant, to our detriment as father and son, that his love sometimes looked like whatever brand of science he was using at the time. And if my recent experiences with the medical, scientific, and government communities during his death are any indication, the oblivious way of approaching science that he used all those years ago is alive and thriving today.

We never got the test. COVID-19 was hitting Boston hard, the mortuary needed the space, so we had to bury him before we could get his doctor to return our calls.

Last summer, I spent a month reading through everything my father ever wrote. I could see an evolution in his work over the last 40 years, an evolution I missed until it was too late to ask him about it. I could see this shift most clearly in an address he gave to the Swedish Parliament in 2011.

In the talk, he completely loses control of his hands—which he does when he’s excited—while talking about dyslexia. People with dyslexia look at the world differently, he says, not better or worse than anyone else. He points out that astronomers with dyslexia are far better at finding black holes, and that thinking about dyslexia without judgement has transformed what is possible for children with dyslexia.

He had long ago evolved beyond the young man who had framed Frodi’s actions, and mine, in terms of passing and failing. If we view subjects as humans, he had learned over the decades, if we take off the veneer of coldness and judgement at the heart of much scientific thought, we will soon find ourselves getting better answers.

And it was his dual focus, late in life, on both humanity and finding answers that makes me think he would have been livid at the way his death was handled. It wasn’t just that knowing whether he had COVID-19 would have been kind to his family and to his caretakers, though that would have been foremost on his mind. It was also that his case might have helped scientists learn something.

If he were alive and well today, if he were watching millions sick or dead of a new illness while our political and medical institutions crumble around us, I like to think the advice he’d give us is this: It is time to fight fiercely for a warm and broadminded approach to science and medicine, for a humble understanding of humans as complex, varied, and dynamic creatures.

This is true for moral reasons, but it is also true for practical reasons. The best way to be kind is to be curious, and the best way to be curious is to be kind.

The post The Renowned Psychologist Who Fathered a Theory of Child Development, a Rhesus Monkey, and Me appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My doubts, as it happened, had some validity. The name Central Metric Office proved to be a red herring, since the office’s purposes were narrow. Scotland Yard had something very specific in mind: a system of criminal identification, imported from France, relying on card files of prisoners that were sorted according to an array of bodily measurements. The office in question, though, offered evidence that police devotion to data was quite real, and the office was linked to an impressive network of measurement activities. Probing the episode of the Central Metric Office opened up a new perspective on the history of genetic knowledge, and even on its human meaning.

Most textbook accounts have genetics emerging quite suddenly in 1900. Historians have long treated this moment as pivotal. The year 1900 is when Gregor Mendel’s decades-old hybridization experiments on peas suddenly became famous. Almost immediately, his work was celebrated as the foundation for a science of biological inheritance.

At almost the same time, in 1899, measurements such as those collected by the Central Metric Office drew the attention of anthropologists. A year later they appeared in the first issue of a pioneering statistical journal, Biometrika, with a triumvirate of editors that included eugenic pioneers Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Their movement to investigate how heredity shaped abilities and “defects” was just then getting off the ground, and they worked to support it with vast repositories of data from schools, universities, prisons, hospitals, and insane asylums. The Mendelian and biometric strains of eugenics thus began to flourish almost simultaneously. However, modern scholarship, taking a more cultural approach, is uncovering a much richer and longer history for the investigation of human heredity.

In fact, as further probing revealed, the biological inheritance of criminality had been widely suspected, often simply assumed, for decades before the London police first spoke of a Central Metric Office. But prison officials had very little access to family data. It was only around 1900 that hereditary information on criminals began to appear in connection with a crisis, as it seemed, of “feeblemindedness.”

What brought about this supposed crisis, paradoxically, was the expansion of schooling. Beginning about 1870, as governments made elementary education universal and even mandatory in much of Europe and North America, they created a category of child known as “feebleminded.” Those who fell behind in school were given this label. They were sometimes sent to special schools, where they were subject to medical and psychological examination. Followers of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso claimed that such children were biologically and morally backward: in short, born criminals. Others denied this, arguing that the defective children were not specifically criminal, but simple and gullible, hence vulnerable to bad influences.

It was, however, the supposed link of criminality to feeblemindedness that sparked systematic data collection on criminal heredity. Felons, arriving in jails or prisons as adults and attended by police officers with no medical training, were unlikely to provide information on the mental health of their families. The opposite was true for schoolchildren under the watch of teachers, doctors, and school officials. The role of heredity in feeblemindedness became a hot topic in the late 19th century, and schools for such children turned into sites for hereditary investigation. It was a huge stimulus to the nascent eugenics movement, which in many respects took off long before 1900, though it was not known as such.

Breeding results on peas and poultry provided a basis for genetic explanations, but did not create these hereditary concerns. Rather, medical-social anxieties contributed to the excitement about breeding and heredity that made biometric as well as Mendelian methods seem thrilling and even fateful. From about 1880, special schools were the most important sources of data on human heredity and of proto-eugenic anxieties.

To get the full picture, however, we need to look even further back to earlier sources for hereditary and eugenic study. Record keeping on inheritance of feeblemindedness was shaped by an enterprise whose first beginnings can be traced back at least to 1789. In January of that year, King George III’s symptoms of madness became alarming enough to precipitate a constitutional crisis in England. Was the king likely to recover, or would it be necessary to appoint his son as regent?

Dr. William Black, a veteran of studies of smallpox inoculation, knew how to proceed with such questions. He found his way to private records on the insane (there were no good public ones) from the royal asylum of Bethlem. Within months, Black published tables of cure rates in relation to several variables, including one on causes of insanity. “Family and hereditary” appeared here as perhaps the most important cause of all.

Black’s statistics were exceptional, but a vast expansion of insane asylums in the early 19th century stimulated new routines of recordkeeping. Causes of insanity were of particular interest. Lay as well as medical witnesses endorsed the key role of hereditary causation right from the start. Although the new public asylums at first reported abundant cures, patient numbers increased with hyper-Malthusian fury. Disappointed by their failure or inability to cure their patients, the doctors (known as “alienists”) focused more and more on the presumed causal role of heredity. If this alarming epidemic could not be checked by medicine, the key might be to persuade young men and women tainted by bad heredity to refrain from marriage.

When King George III’s madness became clear, Dr. William Black searched the records of the royal asylum, Bethlem Hospital, to understand which patients had recovered. Courtesy of the Wellcome Trust/Wikimedia Commons.

This project, eugenic in all but name, was anchored in data collection on patients and their families. A Norwegian alienist, for example, compiled the first family pedigrees of insanity in 1859, and then labored to track the migration of these hereditary factors from generation to generation. Two German doctors compiled data to calculate the increased probability of madness when one or both parents had been diagnosed insane.

When statisticians and geneticists turned their attention to questions of human heredity around 1900, they learned immediately that psychiatrists and school psychologists already possessed not just unmatchable data on the transmission of mental illness and mental weakness, but sophisticated tools to compile and analyze the numbers. All this data work led to modest scientific successes punctuated by embarrassments, as claims for the discovery of a single hereditary factor for mental illness soon appeared scandalous. Data files also facilitated the injustice, as it is now recognized, of forced sterilization—which was legal for a time in much of the United States and abroad—as well as mass killings of asylum patients in Nazi Germany.

Partly in reaction to these horrors, postwar human and medical geneticists tried to model their science on fruit fly genetics. But doctors, psychologists, and geneticists could not put aside this old faith in genetic causes of schizophrenia, mental disability, even criminality. Geneticists in the 1970s gathered data from prisons in the expectation that much violent crime might be explained by the presence of an extra Y chromosome, and the campaign or the Human Genome Project was included promises to identify the genes for schizophrenia.

The science of human genetics has deep roots in eugenic doctrines and projects that go back more than two centuries. The use of numbers to support ideas arising from fear or bigotry is not limited to benighted days gone by.

The post Modern Ideas About Genes Were Conceived in 18th Century Asylums appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It is no surprise that 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated in the last two years: Things that used to be anonymous, private, and unnoticed are now in plain sight. Alexa eavesdrops in our homes, Google remembers our most revealing searches, and even churches are using facial recognition to find out who is sitting in the pews. We are starting to see a bigger picture of limitless monitoring: a world where the watchers never reach the point of “enough” information and instead require an ever-expanding data set about our movements, buying patterns, online activity, and workplace productivity.

But even as surveillance becomes a dominant force organizing our world, most Americans haven’t had an informed conversation about how it is changing the way we live, work, play, and even wage war. We do not yet know who benefits from all this monitoring, classifying, and archiving of our behavior. Nor have we figured out whether surveillance will really make us safer, happier, or healthier. Such questions are sometimes difficult to answer because the technology is moving so much faster than our ability to make sense of it.

In fact, Americans have complex, ambivalent feelings about surveillance. We might be excited to hear that a digital pill can tell our doctor via Bluetooth that our meds have been ingested on time, but worry what will happen once the insurance companies know the contents of our stomach. We might want a smart refrigerator to order milk when we run out, but might not want the Internet of Things to listen to everything in our “smart home,” especially when we have a family crisis unfolding, such as a teenager dealing with drug addiction or a pregnancy scare. We might like taking nature photos with our own small drone, but wince when laws don’t prevent a creepy neighbor from flying his drone over our teenager’s backyard pool party. We happily share our lives on Facebook, but are outraged when we read about their scheme to manipulate our emotions. “Now that the experiment is public,” Forbes reported, “people’s mood about the study itself would best be described as ‘disturbed.’”

Yet we often live in a kind of surveillance denial, assuming it’s not a problem if we’re not doing anything wrong, or that it’s only a concern in other countries. For instance, most Americans probably shudder when they hear about the rise of social credit scoring in China. An authoritarian government watching everything through sophisticated CCTV and online monitoring systems, then coming up with a score that could prevent someone from getting a job—it sounds like something out of a dystopian movie. But if Americans assume it can’t happen here, they’re not paying attention. Consider the potential abuses of workplace surveillance. For an increasing number of American workers, the boss can see almost everything, even if you are a freelancer working in sweatpants at the kitchen table. Productivity software can take a snapshot every 10 minutes and combine them with keystroke analysis to create a “focus score” or “intensity score” for each worker.

Yet surveillance is rarely a cost-free endeavor. We may not realize it, but surveillance changes us, sometimes subtly, more often profoundly as we try to manage the impression we make on social media or on security cameras. The ubiquitous eyes of these devices can shift the way we’re supposed to feel about a particular place (is it safe to use the retina scanner ATM?) or particular action (will they think I’m stealing?). Surveillance often adds another angle, another perspective that not everyone experiences as benign or even tolerable. Social psychologists looking at workplace surveillance have found ample evidence that even the threat of surveillance is enough to change behavior, making workers “follow rules more carefully and act more subservient,” as well as experiencing greater stress, a loss of personal control, and “a decreased sense of procedural justice.” It’s harder to work when you know a camera is perched over your shoulder and productivity software is analyzing your keystrokes for maximum efficiency. Employers might like such productivity metrics, but rarely consider the cost to workers who feel like they have no place to hide.

For many of us, surveillance forces an adjustment of our interior life, a stiffening of our feelings: Someone is watching. Better look productive. Better not arouse suspicion. In this sense, surveillance can add an emotional charge to an existing atmosphere: It may even channel our chaotic energies into officially approved channels with names like vigilance, dread, fear, relief, certainty, permanence, compliance, consumption, adding a layer of meaning to the social scene that we can feel in our gut or on the back of our neck. Especially when surveillance is focused on security, it can add the gnawing sense that “something bad happened here,” “something bad could happen here,” “someone is watching,” or even the fantasy that “someone will save me.” Privacy, on the other hand, grants us a reprieve from such anxieties and uncertainties; it gives us the gift of what one scholar calls “emotional liberty.”

If we value liberty and autonomy, we need to have a more critical conversation about surveillance technology, one that leads to smarter legal protections of our privacy and dignity both online and off. People need to be able to educate themselves and choose not only how these technologies exist in the world at large, but also how much access they have to our personal data and even our bodies.

Right now, the spread of surveillance systems has a lot of momentum, though, ironically, they have rarely faced real scrutiny. Coming on the heels of his involvement in the Edward Snowden affair, Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s former editor, wrote that “securicrats” in the United States and United Kingdom are working to “collect and store ‘all the signals all the time’—that means all digital life, including internet searches and all phone calls, texts, and emails we make and send each other.” This is the cultural logic of the present moment: making human life endlessly visible, recordable, sortable, accountable, with little regard for how this might feel to millions of people. Everything goes into the archive. No one can opt out. Nothing goes away.

Is this really what we want? As someone who has spent the last 10 years exploring this issue, I fear a fundamental human right is missing here: the right to be left alone. Too often we think of freedom in a narrow sense, that it is simply what the law allows us to do or say. But we also need freedom from the quietly oppressive forces in our world. In the case of surveillance, we need freedom from insidious kinds of supervision, coercion, expectation, and obligation, all of which are rife in a world of ubiquitous surveillance. Psychologically, emotionally, and maybe even spiritually, we need freedom from the conformist pressures of CCTV cameras, the psychological burdens of workplace monitoring, the anxiety of being scrutinized by credit card companies looking at our purchases, or simply strangers gawking at us on social media.

Must we be subjected to the constant threat of exposure and scrutiny in every part of our life? Must everything be seen, shared, and sorted? Must everything be visible on social media, CCTV, or TSA body scanner? I hope not.

And I hope we don’t shrug and simply grow accustomed to ever-increasing levels of invasiveness. Even if some aspects of surveillance culture are entertaining and even humane, from the benign side of social media to the well-intentioned camera connecting us to an elderly relative, too often we are faced with something much more controlling, if not outright manipulative. In its harsher forms, surveillance is nothing more than cold prodding to suss out our commercial prospects, to determine if we’re a potential asset or liability to some corporation, alternating with the even colder scrutiny of the state to see if we’re doing what we’re told. It’s not pleasant if you stop to consider what surveillance does to our bodies and souls, not to mention the healthy functioning of a democracy. All I’m suggesting is that we stop and think about it.

The post How Digital Technology Is Making Us Subservient, Anxious, and Uncertain appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This was one happy if serious conclusion from a Zócalo/UCLA Anderson School of Management event titled, “Can Individuals Be Happy in an Unhappy Time?” Before an overflow crowd at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown L.A., three scholars who study different aspects of happiness touted a wide variety of research on happiness and offered tips for how to cultivate happiness in yourself.

“When you feel happy, it’s not that you don’t experience those negative things in the world. It’s that those negative things are less intense,” said panelist Cassie Mogilner Holmes, an associate professor of marketing and behavioral decision-making and the Donnalisa ’86 and Bill Barnum Endowed Term Chair in Management at UCLA Anderson. Happiness, she added, “is sort of that immune system that keeps us going.”

The event began with moderator Madeleine Brand, host of KCRW’s “Press Play,” asking the audience to clap if they felt happy at that moment. She received loud—but not overwhelming—applause in response. Brand then pressed the scholars on whether happiness was too fleeting to be an important goal.

The scholars answered that happiness provided such advantages that, one quipped, “it’s almost unfair.” Happier people do better in life by all kinds of measures, from wealth to health. And the benefits accrue, such that the happy get happier.

Holmes emphasized that time has a crucial relationship to happiness. Her research shows that money is less important than people think, and time far more important. Studies from the early part of the decade suggest that once your income reaches $75,000, additional money doesn’t translate into feeling happier in the course of your daily life. Those who focus more on time than money are happier.

“Time leads to greater happiness,” she said, “and people become more deliberate in how they spend their time” over the course of their lives. The trouble is that many of us spend so much of our waking lives doing things—work, housework, commuting—that we don’t enjoy.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at UC Riverside and author of the books The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness, said her favorite theory in psychology is self-determination theory, which argues that we are happy when we satisfy three basic needs: connectedness, autonomy, and competence.

Genetics, she noted in response to an audience question, can affect happiness. So can other factors. But our own choices, especially around how we use our time to satisfy our needs to connect, to be autonomous, and develop our competence, can help. She carpools when she commutes between her home in Santa Monica and her job in Riverside, because “I’m with other people, and I strengthen my friendships.”

The third panelist, UCLA Anderson behavioral psychologist Hal Hershfield, said that while happiness is very important, “meaning, and the pursuit of meaning may be more important…. If you’re climbing a mountain, that may not be a happy experience, but it’s a meaningful one.”

Hershfield discussed his work getting people to look at their future selves, and to figure out what they’ll need to do to make sure they can fund the sort of life they want in the future. The challenge, he said, is that humans are “really bad at predicting what will make us happy.”

But thinking about endings—the ending of lives or the ending of phases of our lives—seems to allow us to focus on the most meaningful things. Studies of college seniors found that they start spending more time with their very closest friends around graduation, he said.

When Brand, the moderator, asked who the unhappiest people were, the panelists initially differed. Lyubomirsky said it was younger people—ages 14-28—because they have less autonomy and less competence. She also said that the current generation of very young people are less happy, have lower self-esteem and more anxiety than previous generations, and those things may correlate with smartphone use and screen time.

Hershfield noted that many studies point to the greatest unhappiness among people in middle age.

But these differences in part reflect differences in surveys and the fact, noted by Holmes, that people experience happiness differently at different stages of life. Young people associate happiness with excitement and enthusiasm, and older people with calm and serenity.

Older people tend to be happiest, suggested Hershfield, because they have time and experience “to focus more on emotionally meaningful goals.”

In response to a question from Brand, the panelists noted that happiness is a particular challenge for Americans. The “pursuit of happiness” is a defining quality of American life—it’s in the Declaration of Independence—but Americans work more and often take less vacation, even though research shows vacation is associated with greater happiness.

Holmes suggested being more attentive to time and to the people around us in the moment will make us happier. As Americans, she said, “we often make decisions, with our Puritan ethic, that we shouldn’t feel happy right in this moment.”

During a question-and-answer session with the audience, an audience member asked the panelists to name one thing they did that made them happier. Brand, the moderator, said she bought a wood-handled scrubber in a Japanese houseware store that cleans perfectly and looks beautiful next to her sink. “That makes me happy,” she said with a chuckle.

Holmes said optimizing unhappy time; during a long commute, “pick up the phone and call your friend who you haven’t spoken to in a while,” she said. Lyubomirsky said she was trying to spend less time on small talk, and foster connection by having bigger conversations with friends, including old ones with whom she had lost touch.

Hershfield said he is trying to create more traditions and routines in his life. He found that taking his daughter to breakfast at the same restaurant every Tuesday made him happier. “It’s the first time I’ve been a regular at a place,” he said.

The post Yes, You Can Be Happy in Sad Times appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Of course, if you ask most people, they are likely to say they deplore gossip, but as a social scientist who studies how organizations work, it’s clear to me that it plays a more positive role in the workplace than we might expect.

Research suggests that gossip provides groups with important benefits. For example, recent social psychological studies consistently have found that gossip can be motivated by the desire to protect one’s group against those who violate norms. People begin gossiping when they observe someone behaving in ways that are not in line with group mores. A norm violator who, say, doesn’t contribute to group goals while benefitting from group resources is engaging in behavior that economists call “free riding.” Observing a group member behaving like a free rider motivates people to gossip about the norm violator, in an attempt to protect other group members as well as the group’s resources as a whole.

Studies also show that gossiping is an effective way to deter group members from behaving selfishly. The mere threat that other group members might gossip about uncooperative actions makes members more cooperative. For example, in 2011, I worked with Gerben Van Kleef on an experiment that asked participants to choose between keeping valuable lottery tickets for themselves or donating them to the group they belonged to. If a ticket that was donated to the group won, the whole group would share the prize.

We found that participants gave more lottery tickets to the group when they believed that their group members would learn about their decision and when they believed group members had a high tendency to gossip. This finding was driven by reputational concern; when the threat of gossip is high, group members worry that their reputation may be damaged when they behave uncooperatively. The likelihood that others might gossip about them motivates people to behave according to group norms.

From this angle, gossip seems remarkably effective at deterring group members from engaging in selfish behaviors in the first place, and punishing them when they do. Of course, one could argue that directly informing norm violators that their behavior is unacceptable would also serve the goal of sanctioning or preventing norm violations. But most people don’t like direct confrontation, and research from the 1970s suggests that people refrain from overt sanctions because of the risk of retaliation. Indeed, gossiping about norm violators is obviously much less risky, as it enables people to indirectly punish norm violators, build coalitions, and warn their group members against uncooperative slackers—all without exposing themselves to possible adverse reactions by the norm violator. Recent research backs up this strategy, finding that gossip is at least as, or even more, effective in establishing cooperation than directly punishing norm violators.

As I and other colleagues have done research that essentially sings the praises of gossip, enthusiastically discussing its benefits for group functioning, I’ve come to wonder why the idea that gossip is bad is so widespread. Many people claim to hate gossip. Religions around the world view it as asocial, objectionable behavior (the Quran, for instance, compares gossiping to eating the flesh of one’s dead brother). How can we understand the virtually universal condemnation of gossip in light of the functions that gossip has for groups?

Currently there is no research that directly answers this question, so we can only speculate on why everyone claims to hate gossip so much. Possibly people gossip for many reasons, of which the positive ones, like warning groups about norm violators and protecting group cooperation, are the most benign. In fact, there are several lines of research that point to other motives for gossip. Gossip has, for example, been described as a form of indirect aggression, driven by self-interested motivation to destroy the reputation of potential social rivals.

Moreover, gossip may also have negative effects on groups. It has been shown to coincide with specific types of social network structures called coalition networks, in which some individuals have positive connections with each other but jointly share negative ties with someone else. Coalition networks are plagued by destructive power struggles.

Despite the alleged benefits of gossip to groups, studies in organizations also have found correlations with decreased cooperation and decreased psychological safety—the feeling that the social environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.

These lines of research paint a much less rosy picture of gossip: Rather than a group-oriented mechanism that fosters social control and cooperation, they portray gossip as a self-interested behavior that is toxic for groups.

There is currently no overarching theory or empirical study that can pinpoint exactly what motivates gossip, and when it is useful or, in contrast, detrimental, to group functioning. However, if we accept the idea that gossip is a multifaceted phenomenon that is sometimes driven by genuine concern for the welfare of one’s social groups, but at other times driven by less noble motives, we may begin to speculate about where gossip gets its negative reputation from.

For starters, there is what psychologists call negativity bias, which means that negative impressions are stronger than positive ones. When people experience a combination of negative and positive things, they evaluate them more negatively than you’d predict. One single instance of nasty, mean gossip might spoil a whole barrel of group-protective, pro-social gossip episodes.

But that still leaves another question: Why do people claim to hate gossip but still participate in it? For that, we could look at another famous bias, the self-serving bias, which is the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner. Because of this bias, we may see gossiping in general as objectionable, but our own gossip as acceptable.

Finally, it’s possible that simply saying we hate gossip makes gossip itself even more effective. Studies that have examined gossip as a mechanism that protects groups against norm violations consistently point out that gossip might be such a popular response because it is relatively risk-free. Gossip can be used to punish group members without requiring that the punishers have any confrontations with potential negative consequences.

It’s an effective strategy, in other words, but there’s an element of sneakiness about it. And it becomes an even better stealth weapon if one consistently portrays oneself as a non-gossiper. Claiming to hate gossip while at the same time using gossip when the need arises makes it very unlikely that norm violators will recognize who is attacking them. Perhaps this contributes to the popularity of gossip and its simultaneous universal condemnation.

Many things about gossip are poorly understood. But if someone tells you they hate gossip, you might want to question what exactly their intentions are.

The post The Social Upside of Workplace Gossip  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For example, in his recently published book Midlife, the MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya looks at the topic from a philosophical perspective. Declaring gender differences irrelevant, Setiya presents the quest for self-knowledge as an endeavor that concerns primarily men: the author himself (who experienced a crisis at the age of 35) and the great men of philosophy, from John Stuart Mill to Arthur Schopenhauer. When he reads Leo Tolstoy, the moral philosopher is interested in Count Vronsky, not the title heroine Anna Karenina.

What has almost entirely dropped out of sight is that the midlife crisis was initially a feminist idea that became popular in the mid-1970s. Back then, “midlife crisis” described how men and women abandoned traditional gender roles: Approaching 40, women re-entered the world of work, while their husbands stepped in to help at home.

But in the years since then, the tale of the midlife crisis has come to focus on men in a way that bolsters gender hierarchies, rather than challenging them. Indeed, the male midlife crisis has been used to limit women’s rights and advancement.

It was the Yale social psychologist Daniel Levinson who presented one of the earliest formulations of the male midlife crisis, which circulated widely in the media and professional psychological community. In 1978, he published The Seasons of a Man’s Life, based on a study of 40 men between 35 and 45 years old, mostly white and educated. It depicted the “midlife decade” as a period of change, during which men reinvented themselves. The book’s key case study, “Jim Tracy,” was a vice president and general manager at a Connecticut-based arms manufacturer. After a series of sexual escapades, he divorced his wife and married a younger woman, then left the corporation to open his own business. Levinson held that such a “mid-life transition” or “mid-life crisis” (a term coined by the psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques in the 1950s, but not widely used until 20 years later) was a universal feature of human life, shared across social and cultural differences.

However, Levinson made an exclusion to the concept: He did not study women’s lives, interviewing the 40 men’s wives only to learn about their husbands. Despite this lack of empirical evidence, the psychologist’s description of the male midlife crisis was closely tied to his understanding of women’s roles: At a time when the women’s movement was widely popular in the United States, influencing public opinion as much as social policy and legislation, Levinson opposed the transformations in women’s lives. He used psychological research to bar women from changing their lives.

In Seasons, Levinson emphasized the importance of marriage to a man in his twenties and early thirties. He used the term “special woman” to describe the devoted at-home wife and mother who helped a man to become successful, or, in Levinson’s terms, fulfill his “Dream,” a concept borrowed from the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. If the “special woman” had a job at all, it was as an unmarried woman seeking a husband, or in an occupation such as teaching or nursing “where she is appropriately maternal, sub-ordinate and non-competitive with men.”

Levinson stressed the significance of separate spheres—breadwinning father, homemaking mother—to a man’s professional advancement by contrasting the “special” with the “liberated” woman whose involvement in a career produced “bitter discontent and conflict” in a marriage and was in his view against nature: “It is hard enough to form a life structure around one person’s Dream. Building a structure that can contain the Dreams of both partners is a heroic task indeed, and one for which evolution and history have ill prepared us.”

The psychologist highlighted the motherly implications of a perfect wife’s virtues. She was “generally maternal and caring and makes things easier for him.” Drawing again on Winnicott’s well-known definition of the “good enough mother,” Levinson compared the “good enough” wife’s relationship to her husband to that of a mother and child. Like a boy’s mother, too, the special woman was a “transitional figure”: “During early adulthood, a man is struggling to outgrow the little boy in himself and to become a more autonomous adult. The special woman can foster his adult aspirations […]. Later, in the Mid-life Transition, he will have to become a more individual person. With further development, he will be more complete in himself and will have less need of the […] special woman.”

A man’s midlife crisis, then, was a justification for abandoning his wife. As relevant as she had been in their 20s and early 30s, for the middle-aged man, his wife was “neither necessary nor desirable.” The professional success the at-home wife had helped to build was no longer the established 40-year-old’s priority; indeed, at middle age, her “special” qualities were considered “overly controlling,” “smothering,” “depriving and humiliating.” And just as for Winnicott, the child did not owe its mother anything—she was “devoted” by nature—so for Levinson, the husband had no obligations toward his wife, while her responsibilities continued nonetheless. The psychologist bemoaned that many wives did not fully “appreciate” their husbands’ “need for a greater measure of autonomy,” and that some even acted as a “destructive witch or selfish bitch using both her strength and her weakness to keep him in line and prevent him from becoming what he truly wants to be.”

Not just a reiteration of gender stereotypes, Levinson’s concept of midlife crisis was anti-feminist. By excluding women from his concept of midlife change, the psychologist banned them from redefining their lives and seeking self-fulfillment outside the home. For Levinson, women’s liberation hindered men from releasing their full potential.

Levinson claimed that a woman’s “growing assertiveness and freedom” in middle age would result in her partner’s “severe decline.” He warned of the moment when a wife “becomes the voice of development and change,” “takes the initiative in reappraising the marriage,” and “seeks to expand her own horizons and start new enterprises outside the home.” Levinson cautioned that “the husband may then become the voice of the status quo. Moreover, a man who feels that his own youthfulness is in jeopardy may be more threatened than pleased. […] He has less authority […] and feels increasingly obsolescent […]. Where this occurs, it is a serious problem for the entire family.” Several years later, Levinson’s follow-up The Seasons of a Woman’s Life argued at book-length that in midlife, women discovered that it was impossible for them to find satisfaction in work or professional careers. A woman’s place was in the home.

Levinson’s idea came with scientific credentials and it was quickly picked up in the academy and beyond. The science writer Robert Kanigel expressed the thoughts of many critics when he praised Seasons as a profound and life-changing book: “I came away weak with wonder at the drama in every human life.” For Richard Rhodes, the widely published writer and historian, Levinson’s work was not just “authoritative” but indeed “as important and fully as extraordinary, as Kinsey’s [reports on human sexual behavior].”

During the 1980s, as an anti-feminist backlash became widespread in the United States, Levinson’s ideas were frequently reiterated. Psychological and psychiatric experts who published on the topic, often with reference to Levinson’s Seasons, were now joined by physicians. In his 1984 book Crisis Time!, the prominent surgeon Robert Nolen suggested married women wait for their husbands—two years seemed an appropriate benchmark—and consider the situation: “Can she absolutely not tolerate his relationships with other women? Or can she write it off as ‘men will be men’?” Similarly, the Californian psychiatrist Jim Stanley, who regularly treated middle-aged couples, charged women for holding “unrealistic” expectations of men and advised them to be understanding, patient, and “more accepting” of their husbands’ midlife behavior.

In 1989, Levinson himself capitalized on the continued success of his theory and turned Seasons into a documentary. Broadcast on PBS, Halftime: Five Men at Midlife chronicled the midlife crises of five male Yale graduates, Class of 1963, selected by Levinson, who also interviewed them at length in front of the camera (individually and in a group session). Among them were Hollywood executive Steve Sohmer, complete with fat cigar, Rolls Royce, and Rolex, who talked about his experience of going through multiple marriages, love affairs, and jobs, and Mike Redman, a former Olympian, who aired his anger over his wife’s request for a divorce.

By then, the male midlife crisis was an accepted cultural phrase. Its academic cachet allowed it to parade as a scientific, methodologically rigorous discovery. Even now, many are unaware of the profoundly anti-feminist stance that motivated the idea of men’s midlife crisis. As a defensive reaction against the women’s movement, Levinson’s definition of the midlife crisis drew on the language of personal development to stabilize gender hierarchies and prevent women from changing their lives. Retelling this account of the male midlife crisis today—tuning out Anna Karenina’s story in favor of Vronsky—means nourishing a narrative that has played important political roles.

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