You Are a Group Project

Today I want to generously share from two books further down in the post. First, though, a few snippets from my life. Starting with this post's title.

You are a group project.

That sentence showed up in the introduction to a book I just sampled and chose not to finish. It's a short, simple sentence, but I think it speaks volumes. None of us lives in isolation. We are constantly, always influenced by others. Shaped by them. Parents, teachers, friends, peers, media, culture. We cannot escape it. We are social animals to our cores. And that is a good thing. It's essential to being human. So everyone, each of us, is made by others.

You are a group project.

The two books below offer more in-depth perspectives on this.

The other day I randomly asked a question as a post on Facebook:

If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you join them?

We all get asked this question as kids, but almost never get a chance to answer it as adults. I thought I'd provide the opportunity to my friend group. I wasn't really thinking any deep thoughts related to it at the time, wasn't trying to make a point, just trying to be fun and silly. Yet looking at it now, it has a place in this post.

I didn't get very many responses, but two are worth sharing. The first:

My friends are intelligent people, and most of them have some flavor of physical difficulty. If they're leaping off bridges there's a very good reason for it. I would most likely join them unless a better option becomes apparent in the meantime.

The second:

I think this is a brilliant and extremely deep question about human beings by the way . . . 

My answer is yes. Because despite the premise of the question, I think none of us are as open-minded and free-thinking as we think we are. Our politics confirms this. So no matter what the behavior, If everyone you trust were doing something, I don’t think a single person would trust their own so-called free will over the collective judgment of those trusted friends. It’s just like the architect from The Matrix says, we are all lemmings, but humans are a special type of lemming that deludes itself into the perception of free will and choice.

You are a group project.

I particularly like message of the picture book Be Strong by Pat Zietlow Miller and Jen Hill, of the way it defines "strength." That definition is completely embedded in the awareness that we are social creatures, and strength is portrayed as being responsive to others.

"So I ask, 'How can I be strong?'" by:

•  Showing Up
•  Speaking Up
•  Not Giving Up

"Being strong means knowing you can make things happen. And turn nothing into something."

"Being strong means moving forward."

"Strong people care. And sometimes cry. They help people, and let other people help them."

That book is from a recent newsletter home to parents by our kids' elementary school principal. He mentioned it with a video he presented to his teachers at the start of the school year. (I'm not sure if he shared them with students or just staff; both are possible for the material.) The video is part of a speech given by Kara Lawson, who (a little research reveals) is a former professional basketball player, current college basketball coach, and TV basketball analyst. The video is titled Handle Hard Better. Here's an abridged and selective bit of transcript:

If we just get through this, things will get easier. It's what we do: we wait for stuff to get easier.

It will never get easier.

What happens is you handle hard better. Most people think life is going to get easier, but it never gets easier; what happens is you become someone who handles hard stuff better. That's a mental shift that has to occur in each of your brains. . . . 

If you have a meaningful pursuit in life it will never be easy. Any meaningful pursuit you want to be successful at goes to the people that handle hard well; those are the people that get the stuff they want.

So don't get discouraged through this time if it's hard. Don't get discouraged--it's supposed to be. And don't wait for it to be easy.

I find that wise.

In my last post, The Acquired Sociopathy of Power, I included a long section (at the end of the post) from Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. It was from the chapter "How Power Corrupts," and details how power makes people less compassionate, empathetic, and socially-connected. It makes then lose touch with the ways that they are group projects. Today I offer everything else I noted from the book. I'll start with my review for an introduction:

Bregman believes the main thing wrong with the world is our collective view of human nature. The narrative that controls our government, economic, education, and social institutions is that humans are, at base, selfish and self-centered. So we have created a world based on that expectation. Rules, consequences, incentives and punishments, all meant to control those base instincts, and they've become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We think people are bad so we treat them as they are and they react accordingly.

And Bregman thinks we have it all backwards. His research has led him to conclude that people are instinctively cooperative and social, well-intentioned and compassionate, and most interested in the general well-being of everyone. So he believes that if we could change our outlook and expectations and the way we structure our cooperative ventures in line with that framework, we would act and experience each other much differently.

He offers a compelling argument. He deconstructs much of the evidence and the controlling myths that have lent support to our current understanding of human psychology, then offers a wealth of science and studies that tell a different story. He concludes by sharing examples of institutional structures that flip the narrative successfully. At times I felt he was a bit too intent on confirming his own biases even as he critiqued others for doing the same, busier trying to construct his own convincing narrative than simply presenting findings. Nevertheless, he is convincing. And is certainly engaging and interesting.

It's a fascinating and inspiring book.

If you compare our heads to those of Neanderthals, the differences are even more pronounced. We have shorter and rounder skulls, with a smaller brow ridge. What dogs are to wolves, we are to Neanderthals." And just as mature dogs look like wolf puppies, humans evolved to look like baby monkeys.

Meet Homo puppy.

The domestication of humans and dogs Resulted in:

• Friendlier behavior
• More serotonin and oxytocin
• Longer juvenile stage
• More feminine and juvenile appearance
• Better communication

Considering the most recent evidence of psychology and biology, of archaeology and anthropology, of sociology and history, we can only conclude that humans have for millennia navigated by a faulty self-image. For ages, we've assumed that people are selfish, that we're beasts, or worse. For ages, we've believed civilisation is a flimsy veneer that will crack at the merest provocation. Now we know this view of humankind, and this perspective on our history, is utterly unrealistic.

In the last chapters of this book I've attempted to present the new world that awaits if we revise our view of human nature. I've probably only scratched the surface. After all, if we believe most people are decent and kind, everything changes. We can completely rethink how we organise our schools and prisons, our businesses and democracies. And how we live our own lives.

At this point, I should point out that I'm not a fan of the self-help genre. If you ask me, we're living in an age of too much introspection and too little outrospection. A better world doesn't begin with me, but with all of us, and our main task is to build different institutions.

One of the things Bregman delves into is how catastrophe and being attacked by others unify people, brings them together and often brings out the best in them. It is usually true with both sides in a conflict (even the German Nazis).

As a teenager growing up in Holland, I'd pictured the Second World War as a kind of twentieth-century Lord of the Rings - a thrilling battle between valiant heroes and evil villains. But Morris Janowitz showed that something altogether different was going on. The origins of evil, he discovered, lay not in the sadistic tendencies of degenerate bad guys, but in the solidarity of brave warriors. The Second World War had been a heroic struggle in which friendship, loyalty, solidarity - humanity's best qualities - inspired millions of ordinary men to perpetrate the worst massacre in history.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister calls the fallacious assumption that our enemies are malicious sadists 'the myth of pure evil'. In reality, our enemies are just like us.

This applies even to terrorists.

Bregman succinctly captures one of the human paradoxes I most struggle with, the dual good and bad that come from tribalism.

'What we find over and over again,' said one of Hamlin's colleagues, 'is that babies will choose the individual who is actually mean [but similar to them] to the [nice] one who had the different opinion to themselves.'

How depressing can you get?

Even before we learn to speak, we seem to have an aversion to the unfamiliar. Researchers at the Baby Lab have done dozens of experiments which furthermore show that babies don't like unfamiliar faces, unknown smells, foreign languages, or strange accents. It's as though we're all born xenophobes. . . . 

The sad truth is that empathy and xenophobia go hand in hand. They're two sides of the same coin.

A key component of successfully winning armed conflict is "othering" the people on the other side.

Over the course of history, weaponry has got ever better at overcoming the central problem of all warfare: our fundamental aversion to violence. It's practically impossible for us to kill someone while looking them in the eyes. Just as most of us would instantly go vegetarian if forced to butcher a cow, most soldiers become conscientious objectors when the enemy gets too close.

Down the ages, the way to win most wars has been to shoot as many people as possible from a distance. That's how the English defeated the French at Crécy and Agincourt during the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453), how the conquistadors conquered the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and what the US military does today, with its legions of armed drones.

Aside from long-range weapons, armies also pursue means to increase psychological distance to the enemy. If you can dehumanise the other - say, by portraying them as vermin - it makes it easier to treat the other as if they are indeed inhuman.

It brings to mind what I wrote for the introduction to Morality & Empathy: A Chain of Associations:

First, take a moment to ponder a question: What makes you feel disgust?

Vomit, rot, decay, excrement, and that sort of thing, of course.  But what about people?  Are there particular actions or behaviors that you not only rationally believe are wrong, but to which you react viscerally with disgust?  How about categories of others--are there any groups of people you find disgusting?

Who disgusts you?

We dehumanize the other.

Of course, there is the flip side.

When you start looking, this number turns up everywhere. From Roman legions to devout colonists and from corporate divisions to our real friends on Facebook, this magic threshold pops up all over the place and suggests the human brain is not equipped to juggle more than a hundred and fifty meaningful relationships.

The problem is that while a hundred and fifty guests make for a great party, it's nowhere near enough to build a pyramid or send a rocket to the moon. Projects on that scale call for cooperation in much larger groups, so leaders needed to incentivise us.

How? With myths. We learned to imagine kinship with people we'd never met. Religions, states, companies, nations - all of them really only exist in our minds, in the narratives our leaders and we ourselves tell. No one has ever met 'France' or shaken hands with 'the Roman Catholic Church'. But that doesn't matter if we sign on for the fiction.

We are great at not only dehumanizing others, but at finding was to humanize them so we can identify them as part of our tribes.

So, back to that theme at the top, how we are each a group project. It happens, in part, through the power of expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies.

The Pygmalion and Golem Effects are woven into the fabric of our world. Every day, we make each other smarter or stupider, stronger or weaker, faster or slower. We can't help leaking expectations, through our gazes, our body language and our voices. My expectations about you define my attitude towards you, and the way I behave towards you in turn influences your expectations and therefore your behaviour towards me.

If you think about it, this gets to the very crux of the human condition. Homo puppy is like an antenna, constantly attuned to other people. Somebody else's finger gets trapped in the door and you flinch. A tightrope walker balances on a thin cord and you feel your own stomach lurch. Someone yawns and it's almost impossible for you not to yawn as well. We're hardwired to mirror one another.

Most of the time, this mirroring works well. It fosters connections and good vibes, as when everybody's grooving together on the dance floor. Our natural instinct to mirror others tends to be seen in a positive light for precisely this reason, but the instinct works two ways. We also mirror negative emotions such as hatred, envy and greed. And when we adopt one another's bad ideas - thinking them to be ideas everybody around us holds - the results can be downright disastrous.

And that's where we have the power to make things better, simply by changing the way we think about each other.

Time and again, we assume that others care only about themselves. That, unless there's a reward in the offing, people much prefer to lounge around. A British study recently found that a vast majority of the population (74 per cent) identify more closely with values such as helpfulness, honesty and justice than with wealth, status and power. But just about as large a share (78 per cent) think others are more self-interested than they really are.

Some economists think this skewed take on human nature isn't a problem. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, for instance, argued that incorrect assumptions about people don't matter so long as your predictions prove right. But Friedman forgot to factor in the nocebo effect: simply believing in something can make it come true.

How you get paid for what you do can turn you into an entirely different person. Two American psychologists demonstrated a few years ago that lawyers and consultants who are paid by the hour put a price on all their time, even outside the office. The upshot? Lawyers who meticulously log their hours are also less inclined to do pro bono work.

Like numerous books I mentioned in Free Market Values, Bregman cites the study of the Israeli daycare and how market motivations compete with and undermine human-connection motivations.

I simply find this fascinating.

Among biologists, there's consensus that the instinct to play is rooted deep in our nature. Almost all mammals play, and many other animals also can't resist. Ravens in Alaska love whizzing down snow-covered rooftops. On a beach in Australia, crocodiles have been spied surfing the waves for kicks, and Canadian scientists have observed octopuses firing water jets at empty medicine bottles.

On the face of it, play may seem like a pretty pointless use of time. But the fascinating thing is that it's the most intelligent animals that exhibit the most playful behaviour. In Chapter 3 we saw that domesticated animals play their whole lives. What's more, no other species enjoys a childhood as long as Homo puppy. Play gives meaning to life, wrote the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga back in 1938. He christened us Homo ludens - 'playing man'. Everything we call 'culture,' said Huizinga, originates in play.

Play is social learning. It's how we learn to get along with others.

So what does Bregman see as the solution to conflict and hatred? Contact. Simply having contact with others. Seeing them, hearing them, spending time with them helps us understand them more fully as human. It undermines the instinct to dehumanize them.

Pettigrew and his team rounded up and analysed 515 studies from thirty-eight countries. Their conclusion? Contact works. Not only that, few findings in the social sciences have this much evidence to back them up.

Contact engenders more trust, more solidarity and more mutual kindness. It helps you see the world through other people's eyes. Moreover, it changes you as a person, because individuals with a diverse group of friends are more tolerant towards strangers. And contact is contagious: when you see a neighbour getting along with others, it makes you rethink your own biases.

But what also came out of these studies was the finding that a single negative experience (a clash or an angry look) makes a deeper impression on us than a joke or a helping hand. That's just how our brains work. Initially, this left Pettigrew and his colleagues with a puzzle. Because if we have a better memory for bad interactions, how come contact nonetheless brings us closer together? The answer, in the end, was simple. For every unpleasant incident we encounter, there are any number of pleasant interactions.

The bad may seem stronger, but it's outnumbered by the good.

Contact. So simple.

This is not to say we need to change who we are. Quite the opposite. Among the most notable findings to come out of contact science is that prejudices can be eliminated only if we retain our own identity. We need to realise it's okay that we're all different - there's nothing wrong with that. We can build strong houses for our identities, with sturdy foundations.

Then we can throw open the doors.

It all starts with the way we understand each other, with accepting that we're all in this together and depend upon one another.

We are all group projects.

Like Bregman, I'm not big on self-help books and believe we should focus on institutions. However, I did read (listen to) one not long ago that I found worthwhile: SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient; Powered by the Science of Games by Jane McGonigal. My review:

In brief, this is a guide for adopting a growth mindset and small habits that accumulate and compound exponentially into big life changes.

It's not the type of book I normally go for, but someone shared with me a link to a podcast with McGonigal that intrigued me enough to give this a try. I'm still not crazy about the gung-ho-self-help-iness of the book, but I found the science fascinating and her overall argument insightful and convincing. McGonigal is an expert in the psychology of video games, and she used that knowledge to help herself recover from a traumatic concussion. Part of that process was sharing the "game" she developed for herself--called SuperBetter--with others. Then she asked scientists to help her study the method and its results for five years. She was so convinced of its effectiveness by her own experience, the experiences shared by others, and the data collected by their studies, she wrote this book to share the game.

Though McGonigal is a game advocate, her advice is not "play games" but to adopt a gameful approach to life. To interact with life the way gamers interact with games. It's a perspective, a framing narrative, and a collection of habits. A mindset.

The "seven rules to live by" that make up the SuperBetter method:

1. Challenge yourself - Adopt a challenge mindset
2. Collect and activate power-ups - Seek out whatever makes you stronger and happier
3. Find and battle the bad guys - Strive for psychological flexibility
4. Seek out and complete quests - Take committed action
5. Recruit your allies - Cultivate connectedness
6. Adopt a secret identity - Find the heroic story
7. Go for an epic win - Learn the skill of benefit finding

The game framework provides a fun and playful way of thinking about deep psychological insights.

A sample:

QUEST 27: Hum for 60 Seconds

If you want to be physically stronger, hum for 60 seconds. You can hum any song you want.

Why it works: Humming increases the level of nitric oxide in your nose and sinus cavities. The higher your nitric oxide levels, the less inflammation in your nasal cavity--and that means fewer head aches, allergies, colds, asthma attacks, and infections.

It's easier to hum for a full 60 seconds if you pick a specific song "Yankee Doodle," "I Dreamed a Dream," the Brady Bunch theme song. Try not to give up before an entire minute is up!

It seems insignificant, but that's part of the point: it's easy. The research indicates that simple little actions like this, undertaken with regularity and the right approach, accumulate into big changes. The book is full of little bits of science like this, accompanied by the larger data about how it all works together.

I like this explanation from the "About the Science" appendix:

After the study was completed and presented at two scientific conferences, I asked Roepke what she thought accounted for SuperBetter's demonstrated effectiveness. She offered several theories. First, she zoomed in on its "playful, lighthearted approach." She said: "We all sometimes take ourselves and our thoughts too seriously. By reframing things in gameful ways, SuperBetter can help us gain some perspective and separate ourselves from unhelpful thoughts."

She also cited the underlying science as a crucial element to the game. "Research psychologists have made really wonderful and useful discoveries,” she said, "but the field needs people to help translate hard-to-access, hard to-read journal articles into something more approachable. SuperBetter does this by taking important research and translating it into power-ups, bad guys, and quests."

She also thinks the secret identity and epic wins are a key part of its power to create positive change. "The idea of a heroic journey is really important and compelling," she said. "Stories are central to our lives. We understand others by the stories they tell, and we come to understand ourselves by the stories we tell. SuperBetter offers us a powerful and fun way to change the story. Instead of telling ourselves a story about victimhood or tragedy, we can tell a story about adventure and redemption." That, to her, was potentially the most important piece of SuperBetter. "It reminds us that we can be the hero of our own story."

The approach may not be for everyone, but it won me over, and, if you are intrigued, I suggest giving it a look.

This quote from the book brings to mind Kara Lawson's "Handle Hard Better" message:

"Positive experiences don't always feel 'positive' through and through," Dr. Roepke says. "Often the things that people cite as their best experiences actually involve struggle and pain, not just love and inspiration. Think of the two classic post-ecstatic growth examples: having a baby and training for a marathon! There may actually be a blurry line between so-called positive and negative experiences, between post-ecstatic growth and post-traumatic growth. It could be that our lives are richest when we have a blend of struggle and pain on one hand, and comfort and inspiration on the other--just like athletes are at their best when they have a blend of exhausting work on one hand, and nourishment and rest on the other. The juxtaposition of dark times and bright times--a sort of psychological chiaroscuro--may help us grow the most."

Growth comes out of both good and bad experiences.

I had never heard of the vagus nerve until I read My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts by Resmaa Menakem (see also: Nobody's Ever Clean). The spell check I'm using doesn't even recognize the word "vagus." Yet it was the core concept of Menakem's book and I was delighted to find it the focus of a chapter of McGonigal's:

Once you've chosen your challenge, collecting and activating power-ups is the most important part of daily gameful living. That's because in order to rebound from stress and tackle major life obstacles successfully, you need what scientists call high vagal tone. And power-ups are the best way to get it.

Vagal tone refers to the health of your vagus nerve, which stretches all the way from your brain to your intestines. The vagus nerve touches your heart, lungs, voicebox, ears, and stomach, helping to regulate virtually every important function in your mind and body, from your emotions to your heart rate to your breathing rate to your muscle movement to your digestion.

Because the vagus nerve is so essential to so many biological and psychological functions, its health is an excellent measure of your mind-and-body resilience. Nearly twenty-five years of research, in fact, has consistently shown that the tone, or strength, of the vagus nerve is the single best measure of how effectively a person's heart, lungs, and brain respond to stress.

If you want to get a more concrete feel of what vagal tone is, try this trick: place your fingers on the pulse point on the side of your neck. Feel your pulse for a few seconds to get a sense of its speed. Now start to breathe in and out as slowly as you can.

You should notice that your pulse subtly quickens on the inhalation and slows on the exhalation. It might be easier to notice if you mentally count each beat of the heart. Take a minute now to feel this.

This subtle difference between your pulse when you inhale and exhale is what scientists call respiratory sinus arrhythmia, or RSA for short. Arrhythmia literally means "without a steady beat"; most people associate the term with potentially dangerous heart conditions in which the heartbeat changes erratically. However, a variable heart rate-within certain bounds is absolutely healthy, normal, and necessary. If your heart rate didn't in e during inhalation and decrease during exhalation, you would be at a crease higher risk for heart attack, stroke, aging-related cognitive decline, and stress-induced illness. In fact, the more pronounced the difference between your inhalation and exhalation heart rates, the better.

The bigger the difference, the stronger your RSA--and therefore the stronger your vagal tone. The stronger the vagal tone, the better able you are to control your emotions and thoughts, the more physical pain you can withstand, and the less likely you are to suffer a variety of ailments, from diabetes and irritable bowel syndrome to social anxiety, loneliness, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dr. Stephen Porges, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was the first researcher to identify vagal tone as a physiological marker of stress vulnerability, and he has continued to research it for decades. He argues that increasing vagal tone is the best all-around mental and physical health intervention possible. That's because, he explains, what determines your mental and physical health is not the presence or absence of a stressful life event or even how you react to such an event; it's your neurophysiologic state, or mind-body strength, before a stressful life event occurs. Depending on how much strength you've built up, you will either be more resilient and therefore better able to experience growth, or more vulnerable and therefore likely to experience negative impacts.

What determines your mental and physical health is not the presence or absence of a stressful life event or even how you react to such an event.

Handle hard better.

And one of the primary ideas McGonigal revisits throughout her book is we are made stronger by social connections with others (5. Recruit your allies - Cultivate connectedness). Lots of quests and power-ups and other ways to gain positive energy from interacting with others.

You are a group project.