____TheSkepticalPsychologist.com____ Weekly Blog & Podcast

Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, April 18, 2009

Regarding the recent front-page story (“Love put to test in psych course,” April 10, 2009) and subsequent editorial (“Falling in love,” April 11, 2009) in the San Diego Union-Tribune about my new, somewhat hands-on relationships course at the University of California San Diego:

For the record, all of the techniques that students are trying out are derived from scientific research described in course readings. Researchers in Boston, for example, have found that mutual gazing quickly increases liking and closeness, and a psychologist at SUNY Stony Brook uses a gazing exercise to improve outcomes of negotiations. Your editorial noted that the Bush-Putin meeting might have been improved by a simple locking of eyes, and that’s no surprise.

Having students try out the techniques we’re reading about has led to a dramatic increase in course enrollment and attendance, passionate interest in course material, and fun and engaging class experiences. It will also allow many students to be more successful in a wide range of relationships throughout their lives. If there’s a down side to experiential education, which I’ve promoted over most of my 30-year teaching career, I’ve never found it.

ROBERT EPSTEIN
Department of Psychology
University of California San Diego

The Recent Scandal in Pennsylvania Is the Tip of an Ugly Iceberg

Reprinted from The Huffington Post and the Pennsylvania Citizen’s Voice

The recent scandal involving Pennsylvania juvenile court judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan is the tip of an ugly iceberg.

Ciavarella and Conahan have pleaded guilty to charges that they took kickbacks totaling $2.6 million in return for sentencing minors to incarceration at private detention centers, even when such sentences were not warranted by the facts.  In a typical case, a stellar 17-year-old high school student was ordered to serve three months in detention simply for posting a spoof about her vice principal on her MySpace page, even though the page clearly noted that the material was a joke.

Over a period of five years, upwards of 2,500 young people may have been sentenced unjustly to terms ranging from a few months to several years, with parents charged substantial fines in many cases.  Some juveniles are still incarcerated—a potential nightmare for authorities to try to sort out.

The case has prompted gasps from public officials and considerable news coverage, so perhaps you’ve already heard about it and have drawn your conclusions.  But here’s what you don’t know.

The juvenile justice system was ill-conceived from the start and has unjustly incarcerated millions of young people, not just a few thousand.  The U.S. system, and in fact virtually all juvenile justice systems in countries that now have such systems, were set in motion in 1899 in Cook County, Illinois, by Jane Addams and her wealthy, upper-class colleagues at Hull-House, a Chicago institution dedicated to social reform.

Documents from that era, including Addams’ own writings, make it clear that the agenda of the new court system was not entirely benign.  One of its main reasons for being was to give authorities virtually unlimited power to sweep the offspring of poor immigrants off the streets of major cities, where they were considered an ugly nuisance to America’s morally superior affluent.  New crimes by the dozen were invented for the young that had never been considered crimes by adults:  playing ball on the street, staying out late, consorting with older men, truancy, immorality, and the all-encompassing “incorrigibility”—all basically crimes against the self, not others—often resulting in standard sentences of three years or more.

Addams also believed that America’s sinful, “tender” young people could be returned to the right path by being housed in reformatories staffed entirely by nurturing women.  The tough, angry teens who were actually being incarcerated had other ideas, and by 1928, when the juvenile justice system had spread to all but two states, reformatories had become harsh, crowded, understaffed, underfunded prisons, complete with manacles and whippings.  An extensive 2001 study by the National Research Council confirms that the system as a whole is still disgraceful today, producing “negative effects on behavior and future developmental trajectories.”

The most egregious aspect of the juvenile injustice system was that it stripped minors of their constitutional rights, including the right to a trial by jury and the right to counsel.  Even as of 1960, fewer than 5 percent of juvenile offenders were represented by attorneys, with most hearings taking place in secret and no transcripts or recordings made.  The issue finally came to the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 when it heard the plight of Gerald Gault, a 15-year-old from Arizona who had been sentenced to six years of detention for placing an obscene phone call to a neighbor.  There were no witnesses at his hearing—not even the neighbor who had made the complaint—and had Gault been an adult, the maximum sentence would have been two months in jail and a $50 fine.  In a scathing decision, the court aptly called the juvenile justice system “peculiar,” but it did not broadly restore constitutional rights to minors, leaving open the gaping loopholes exploited by Ciavarella and Conahan.  Only about half of the defendants in Ciavarella’s court were represented by counsel, for example.

If anything, things have gotten worse since 1967.  The 1974 federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act created links between the juvenile justice, mental health, and child welfare systems which have made it increasingly easy to keep young people locked up for years, bouncing from one system to another in what experts call “unplanned” incarcerations.

We need one system of justice and one set of crimes, and no one should be deprived of constitutional rights because of age.  The Fifth Amendment plainly says that “no person” shall be deprived of due process of law; what a tragedy that our society has so often ignored the breadth and power of that language.  As for youth laws, it offends common sense to define staying out late to be criminal just because someone is under a certain age.  A crime should be defined by its harmful effects on people or property, not by the age of the perpetrator.

But wouldn’t a single justice system put our tender young people at special risk?  Not at all.  The adult justice system offers far more resources and protections than any juvenile system, and punishment in the adult system is, at least in theory, always tempered by concerns about competence.  When a perpetrator is found to be mentally ill, retarded, or senile, penalties and housing are adjusted accordingly.  In that respect, where individual young people have special needs, they are far better off in the hands of the adult system—and the U.S. Constitution.

If you have any interest in the future of computers, artificial intelligence, or beautiful Japanese androids, read on….

One of my YouTube videos just crossed the million mark!  It’s a clip of me visiting a beautiful, lifelike, female android in Japan.  Her skin is as soft as human skin (although cold!), and she has the same hairdresser as the newscaster after whom she was modeled.  If you’d like to view the video–and get a glimpse of the remarkable world of machine intelligence that’s coming soon, click here.

My most recent book–an academic text called Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer–is all about that future.   I’ll spare you the considerable cost of buying the book.  Instead, you can read the best parts free of charge by clicking here.  You’ll be able to read the foreword by the eminent philosopher Daniel Dennett, along with my introduction, which is all about the somewhat scary and largely unfathomable future of machine intelligence.

Think you know what the Internet is?  Think again!  It’s not really a tool for human communications; it’s actually an “InterNEST”–a huge, luxurious home we’re building for the first super machine intelligences that come into being about 20 years from now.  What they’ll do in their new home–whether they’ll be friendly to humans or decide to swat us like flies–no one knows….  Click here to read more.

Best wishes for 2009!

Dr. Robert Epstein
http://TheCaseAgainstAdolescence.com
http://CreativityCompetencies.com
http://DrEpstein.com

There are many other types of legitimate partnerships that could use legal validation.

Published in the Los Angeles Times
December 4, 2008

Ever since California voters passed Proposition 8, defining marriage in the state as between one woman and one man, my wife and I have been arguing about it.

She was appalled by the vote, and even more appalled when I told her that I wasn’t. “You’re such a bigot,” she said, “not to mention a hypocrite! How can you be for gay rights [which I am] and against same-sex marriage?” My wife is from the north of England, where they don’t embrace that famous restraint of Londoners.

“Well, I’m only sort of opposed to gay marriage,” I tried to explain, but that just led to more name-calling. I was “wishy-washy,” “cowardly,” a “nobhead.” I don’t even know what that last term means, but judging by my wife’s tone of voice, it was not a compliment.

In these kinds of situations, I’ve learned that written communication is best. So here, my love, is why I think California voters — not to mention voters in 29 other U.S. states — did the right thing.

First, I think everyone but the most mindless libertarians would agree that it’s wise to allow the state to regulate family life to some extent, especially when children are concerned. Through most of human history, children were considered chattel, fully under the control of their parents, no matter how abusive or neglectful. Then, in 1875, Abraham R. Lawrence, a justice of the New York Supreme Court, took up the landmark case of a young girl who had been regularly beaten by her parents. In his ruling, Lawrence took an unprecedented step to end the chattel tradition, ruling that the state could limit parents’ rights when children were at risk. Extensive legislation establishing children’s rights followed, eventually spreading across much of the world.

Many governments also have defined and limited the way adults can partner with each other, although approaches have varied widely. During the 1800s, the then-new Mormon church openly practiced polygyny (one man, several wives), emulating the common patriarchal practices of the Old Testament. Because Christian authorities had banned all forms of polygamy (polygyny, polyandry and group marriage) in the 4th century, mainstream American Christians generally frowned on Mormon polygyny, and court actions and laws eventually forced the Mormon church to ban it too. A unanimous Supreme Court decision in 1878 set the precedent for state interference in religious marriage practices, concluding that “laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices.”

Lifetime one-man one-woman marriages aren’t the only kind of partnerships sanctioned by governments, however. In some countries with large Shiite populations, for example, short-term, fixed-duration marriages (Nikah Mut’ah) are allowed — kind of like our cohabitation rite, except with official recognition and an expiration date. And in many Muslim countries, men are allowed to take up to four wives, a practice described in the Koran. Nearly 1,000 cultures around the world allow some form of polygamy, either officially or by nonregulation; in Senegal, nearly half the marriages are polygamous. In the U.S., both the Libertarian Party and the American Civil Liberties Union have opposed laws prohibiting polygamy.

As for same-sex marriage, since 2001, seven countries have come on board, including mainly Catholic Spain, even though the Roman Catholic Church is officially opposed to the practice.

There is no convincing evidence — absolutely none — that these various forms of romantic partnership do anyone, or any society, or any children, any harm. So I’m not really skeptical about same-sex marriage per se. If anything, I think that same-sex marriage is a shortsighted idea that doesn’t go far enough.

Most Americans insist that they want the word “marriage” to continue to mean a long-term, opposite-sex union, as it has in the Judeo-Christian world for nearly two millennia. To put this issue into better perspective, imagine that English were more like German and that the word marriage had a lot more syllables: longtermoppositesexunion. Should same-sex couples wed under that label?  I say no — and that gay activists have been fighting the wrong battle.

The real challenge is to have the state begin to recognize the full range of healthy, non-exploitative, romantic partnerships that actually exist among human beings. Gays are correct in expressing outrage over the fact that official recognition, the power to make health decisions, inheritance rights and tax benefits, have long been granted to only one kind of committed partnership in the United States. But wanting their own committed relationships to be shoe-horned into an old institution makes little sense, especially given the poor, almost pathetic performance of that institution in recent decades. Half of first marriages fail in the U.S., after all, as do nearly two-thirds of second marriages. Is that really a club you want to join?

Even if marriage were redefined to accommodate same-sex couples in California, would any real benefits ensue? The state’s current domestic partnership law — wait, I mean its longtermsamesexunion law — does nearly everything a state can do for a romantic same-sex couple, creating near parity between gay and straight couples. Gay “marriage” adds little except the label, still leaving those all-important federal rights — accelerated immigration rights, Social Security and federal tax benefits, veterans benefits and many others — completely inaccessible.

Let’s fight a larger battle, namely to have government catch up to human behavior. That means recognizing the legitimacy of a wide range of consensual, non-exploitative romantic partnerships, each of which should probably have its own distinct label.

In the U.S., the highest priority should be to give official recognition to cohabitation, which is, in effect, renewable short-term marriage. Married households are now in the minority in the U.S., and cohabitation is increasing, especially among the elderly. Cohabitors are wary of lifetime commitments (in part, perhaps, because such commitments so often prove to be illusory in our culture), but many would probably like the option of getting the same rights and benefits during their cohabitation that married people have.

This would be a step toward stabilizing relationships as they actually occur in 21st century America, and perhaps even toward reducing our disgraceful divorce rate. Trying to force all legitimate partnerships into one defective box — longtermoppositesexunion — denies millions of caring partners the benefits of state recognition and sets up millions of others to fail.

So, my love, as you can see, I’m not really opposed to gay marriage per se. What I’m opposed to is narrow thinking. The world is changing fast, and one change we need to consider is to have governments recognize a wide variety of legitimate, caring relationships. Gays have pushed us toward greater tolerance of the unfamiliar, but we have a long way to go.

Robert Epstein is a visiting scholar at the University of California San Diego and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today. His most recent book is The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen.

Newt Gingrich (“Let’s End Adolescence,” Business Week, Oct. 30, 2008) is correct in asserting that adolescence is a “failed experiment” in the United States, but his proposal to pay young people to graduate a year or two early from high school is hardly a solution to the extensive problem we have created over the last century.  As I show in my new book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, adolescence is maintained by a complex system of laws and institutions that are growing stronger every day, driven by widespread misconceptions about teen competence, the drug-company-inspired myth of the “teen brain,” and media and fashion industries now extracting nearly $200 billion a year from young people completely mesmerized by the idiotic world of teen “culture.” 

Reversing this trend will require no less than the reeducation of the American public and the dismantling of major institutions.  In more than 100 cultures around the world where young people are welcomed into adult society  at early ages, the teen years are without turmoil.  The extreme turmoil of our own teens, reverberating painfully through our families and our society, is a creation of our culture and entirely unnecessary.

When U.S. presidential candidate John McCain had a birthday recently, television talk-show host Jay Leno told McCain that he had planned to get him a birthday cake but that the local fire chief had objected, commenting, “That many candles?”Indeed, 72-year-old McCain is the oldest person in U.S. history to run for the presidency, and his opponent, 46-year-old Barack Obama, once accused McCain of “losing his bearings,” a polite way of saying that McCain is becoming senile. McCain, in turn, sometimes refers to Obama as “that young man with very little experience.”

The age issue is one of many that will help decide the upcoming election. What’s the truth about it? How much difference does age actually make in competent leadership? Does cognitive ability really decline as we age, and, if so, by how much?

The American public is predictably divided on this issue. Some believe that Obama is indeed too young to assume such high office, even though John F. Kennedy was a mere 43 when he became president. Others insist that McCain is just too old, noting that President Ronald Reagan showed clear signs of Alzheimer’s disease during his second term in office, when he was in his late 70s. Barely three years out of office, Reagan’s cognitive impairment had become severe.

At 55, having been a research psychologist for 30 years now, I decided to take a dispassionate look at these issues. The process proved to be painful in some respects, particularly when I took an honest look at my own declining abilities. But I have long believed that knowing is better than not knowing, no matter what the pain. And when it comes to the issue of cognitive decline, knowing might also be the best defense.

Here, in brief summary form, is what relevant research says about the usual course of cognitive abilities as we age.

First, let’s consider a rather basic ability: learning. Most middle-aged people are aware that their elderly parents are mystified by the latest DVD players, PDAs, and iPods — and that the quickest way to solve a computer problem is to ask a teenager, or even a child. Do you see the trend here? Indeed, research shows unequivocally that our ability to learn new things peaks during our teen years and declines steadily thereafter. One illustrative study, conducted by Harry Braun and Richard Geiselhart a half-century ago, even showed that classical conditioning — that most basic of learning processes first studied by Ivan Pavlov in the early 1900s with dogs — barely occurs at all in elderly humans.

Our ability to acquire new knowledge declines in part because of a decline in most basic memory functions. The deterioration of memory is best illustrated by looking at some old research on what researchers call “incidental” memory — remembering that occurs automatically and without effort. Mnemonic strategies mastered as we get older can mask memory’s decline; when we look at what is remembered accidentally, we get a clearer picture.

Raymond Willoughby of Clark University first studied this phenomenon in 1929. He had people copy pairs of digits and symbols and then — without first having told his subjects that he was going to do so — later asked them to recall which symbol had been paired with each digit. Performance on this task improved from childhood to about age 13 and then declined thereafter, and old subjects performed more poorly on this task than children did. Incidental memory was also studied in a simple but ingenious study conducted by Harold E. Jones and his colleagues in which researchers asked people emerging from a cinema to give details about the film they had just seen. Teens and people in their early twenties performed best — and elderly people could barely remember the name of the movie without looking up at the marquis. As you age, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember things unless you make a concerted effort.

The pattern is the same on classic tests of intelligence — tests that measure basic reasoning ability, certainly an important ability for a nation’s leaders. You may have heard that “IQ” remains relatively stable throughout life, and indeed it does. That’s because IQ is a quotient (”Intelligence Quotient”) — a relative measure that expresses your test score in relation to test scores of people your own age. Your IQ stays roughly the same because you stay in roughly the same place with respect to your cohort.

When you look at raw scores, however — your actual test score before it’s expressed in relative terms — the pattern is distressing. On both the traditional intelligence tests developed by David Wechsler and the more culture-free types of tests developed by J.C. Raven and others, raw scores peak between ages 13 and 15 and decline thereafter. As Wechsler put it, after age 14, increases in mental age in succeeding half-year scores “are so small as to make them unreliable,” and the highest mental age we can achieve is fifteen and a half. In other words, IQ, the relative measure, is stable only because virtually everyone in your cohort is deteriorating at about the same rate.

Findings from studies of IQ are consistent with research conducted by Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and his colleagues and students. Piaget found that the highest level of reasoning, which he called “formal operational thinking,” is normally achieved by age 14 or 15 — if it is ever achieved at all.

You may also have heard that brain size is a poor predictor of intelligence. That’s true when you compare species, and this also applies to genders (no one has ever figured out what human males use all that extra brain mass for). But several studies conducted over the past decade or so show that when it comes to individuals, brain size is in fact an excellent predictor of a variety of cognitive abilities. Does brain size follow the pattern we see with intelligence and memory? Indeed it does. A recent MRI study conduced by Eric Courchesne and his colleagues at the University of California San Diego shows that brain size in humans peaks at about age 14 and declines gradually thereafter. By the time a man–such as candidate McCain — is 70, his brain has shrunk to the size it was when he was about 3. This pattern occurs both for overall brain volume and for the all-important gray matter that contains signaling neurons.

Although not central to the cognition issue, I would be remiss in failing to point out that most of our perceptual and motor capabilities also fit this disturbing pattern: our visual acuity, overall hearing ability, ability to discriminate speech sounds (important during delicate meetings of state), touch sensitivity, and so on. Elderly people sometimes, ahem, face odor challenges because–according to a study conducted in the 1980s — they lose much of their sense of smell in their 70s and 80s. More to the point, reaction time — our ability to respond swiftly to sudden events, which is undoubtedly an important competency for leaders — also follows this pattern. We react to sudden stimuli most quickly in our teens and twenties and quite slowly in old age. (A new study by George Bartzokis and his colleagues at UCLA suggests that some fine motor abilities, such as finger-tapping speed, don’t start declining until age 40, but this is more relevant to pianists than presidents.)

Is the news all bad? Fortunately not. Research suggests that we do become “wiser” as we get older, meaning that we can make especially good decisions in areas where we have accumulated a great deal of specialized knowledge — as long as we don’t need to acquire a great deal of new knowledge quickly, that is. In a static world, wisdom has great value, but in a rapidly changing one, it’s prudent for the old to make way for the young.

As for the candidates, Obama, as brilliant as he appears to be, has likely started having trouble finding his keys, and McCain, his courage notwithstanding, is probably little more than a ghost of his former cognitive self.

This article originally appeared in The Times of London on October 25, 2008 and subsequently appeared in The Huffington Post.

Sarah Palin’s candidacy for vice president has recently generated a number of articles about merit and the lack thereof.   For example, in TIME recently, Sam Harris (”When Atheists Attack,” September 29, 2008)  wonders why a society so obsessed with competence lets down its guard completely “when it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions.” Why do we elect someone “fit to have a beer with” rather than someone fit to lead?

Harris doesn’t say, but the answer is clear.  The simple truth is that we let anyone over 18 vote, no matter how poorly they reason and no matter how little they know about government, candidates, or issues.  In early America, to vote one had to be over 21, male, white, and a property owner. In recognizing that these characteristics were irrelevant to voting competence, we’ve cast them aside one by one, leaving only age as the last irrelevant characteristic–and leaving us with an absurd system in which votes by the millions can be purchased with flashy television commercials.

The solution is to tie voting rights to minimum relevant competence.  This takes care of the rapidly growing nursing home problem, makes far fewer votes available for purchase, gives millions of people a powerful incentive to learn about government, and makes it far more likely that only competent candidates are elected.

How can an incompetent electorate be expected to elect competent leaders?

Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, September 2, 2008

Staff writer Scott Lafee’s article (“Leaves of Gas,” Aug. 28) on artificial trees that remove carbon from the air was fascinating, but it didn’t mention what I believe to be the only viable long-term solution to the carbon problem: perfecting the technology that will turn automobiles into carbon scrubbers and then requiring that all new vehicles worldwide employ that technology. If the car, now a major contributor to the problem, can remove more carbon from the air than it produces, the problem disappears. This is the only proposal I’ve ever seen that automatically “scales up” as cultures worldwide – and especially the developing nations – inevitably become more developed and affluent. Engineers are working on the technology, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s perfected. Who needs artificial trees, when we have mobile vacuum cleaners?

Rob Stein’s recent article on the neural correlates of grief in the Washington Post (Aug. 4, 2008) blatantly misinterprets correlational research. Excited by the recent labeling of a “distinct syndrome” of severe grief that persists for long periods (where’s the discovery here?), Stein appears to be suffering from an even more serious syndrome: the “Brain Overclaim Syndrome”—legal scholar Stephen Morse’s term for the trendy and sometimes dangerous tendency to over-hype brain research. Stein seems surprised to learn that the brains of people who have trouble overcoming grief are somewhat different than the brains of people who recover more quickly. But such differences must exist—just as all behaviors and emotions must somehow be encoded in the brain. Stein’s careless assertion notwithstanding, those brain differences do not explain the differences in behavior or emotion. The idea that you explain behavior by pointing to areas of the brain that light up while someone is behaving is just plain wrong. The neural activity is just more activity to be explained. When motor neurons fire as I’m raising my hand, does the neural activity explain my movement? Of course not. During the years I served as editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, I worked hard to make sure that our writers never made the kind of mistake Stein is making—basically, interpreting a correlational study as if it revealed something about causation. The Washington Post should be no less careful.

Ben Stein’s recent avuncular article about love “by way of economics” in the New York Times (July 13, 2008) pushes folklore and metaphor to the brink, leaving the reader without direction or hope. Is your partner, who’s been crabby for a whole month now, a junk bond? If so, says Stein, hit the road! Or is your partner just a sagging market? If so, he says, stay! But he gives you no way to tell the difference, and he also seems entirely unaware of what volumes of research have taught us in recent decades: that success in relationships is largely about skills - skills, fortunately, that anyone can learn and master. Savvy investors read books, take courses, and consult with experts to sharpen their investment skills, and savvy lovers can do the same, sharpening communication, conflict-resolution, stress-management, and other skills are are critical for the success of long-term love relationships. As Diane Sollee, director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education, puts it, “the survival of marriage is not about love, it’s about skills.”