Amy Sutherland

Interesting article on the ecology of nagging from feminist, Lindsay Beyerstein. She reviews Amy Sutherland’s NY Times article and book which outlines the effectiveness of using animal training techniques on her husband.

On the face of it, being trained like an animal isn’t appealing, but when one considers the alternative…

Finem respice.

Geoffrey Beattie writing about Blair’s book from a psychologist’s perspective in today’s Independent on Sunday.
Interesting.

Blair became a master at masking his true emotional state, hiding his terror with that masking smile. Psychologists have spent many years distinguishing genuine smiles from masking smiles. Masking smiles are asymmetric on the face and fade abruptly as they leave the face, exposing the real emotion underneath. Gordon Brown often tried to cover his negative emotion with a masking smile, but every time the smile fell off his face you could read his true emotions of impatience and irritation clearly. Blair’s great art was masking his fear and terror with a smile that seemed all too genuine.

But his mastery of body language does not stop there. He comments that he and Princess Diana “were both, in our ways, manipulative people, perceiving quickly the emotions of others and able instinctively to play with them”. Throughout the book, he describes how he uses his understanding of body language to his advantage. He writes, “A great belief of mine is that when you are negotiating with someone, the first thing is to set the atmosphere at ease; signify a little glimmer of human feeling; exchange a few pleasantries; and above all start by saying something utterly uncontroversial with which disagreement is impossible. Get the other person’s head nodding. It’s that nod which establishes rapport, and which is an early, tiny sign that all is not lost. I might say: ‘I know you feel strongly about this.’ Well, of course they do; that’s why there’s a dispute; and there would be a nod.”

This is quite clever psychology, because it actually does work and Blair has it to a T, except, it turns out, when he tried it on Breandan MacCionnaith, the leader of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Association, briefly famous during the stand-off at Drumcree. In Blair’s description, MacCionnaith was “completely and totally nodless”. “If I said to him, ‘I know you feel strongly about this,’ he would say, ‘I don’t feel more strongly about this than anything else’.” Blair had met his match; his body-language ploys were being thrown back in his face.

Dealing with fear, masking it and its emergence as a principal driver, is one of the dominant psychological themes of the book. Because Blair has high emotional intelligence and a perceptive eye for his own non-verbal performances (it is almost as if he is his own audience much of the time, standing back and admiring his own polished performance in the way that some narcissists do), he can master the use of non-verbal signals in negotiation. Equally, it makes him strongly critical of people who lack such skills, like Gordon Brown, whom he describes as having “no instinct at the human, gut level” and “emotional intelligence, zero”.

There is something else I find very telling in the book: Blair’s memories of childhood. I was particularly struck by his description of an event that happened in the playground when he was about 10 years old. He says that it was in this very situation that he first learned about courage and fear. He says that he can recall “the exact moment” when he got into a fight with a bully outside the gates of the Chorister School, Durham. This event would seem to be what psychologists call “a flashbulb memory”. A flashbulb memory is a vivid and detailed memory that does not fade with time, unlike all other memories. It is full of clear images etched for all time on to the brain. These are hardwired memories, designed for human survival and shaped by evolution. These are the kinds of enduring and stable memories that you might have if you had ever been in a near-fatal car accident or escaped a bomb blast in Afghanistan, for example. Blair has a flashbulb memory from childhood. He remembers all of the events, exactly where it took place and what was said in great detail. He writes: “Silly, isn’t it, to recall that tiny moment of character development after all these years.”

Flashbulb memories are triggered by two of the most primitive parts of the human brain, the reticular formation, which responds to surprise, and the amygdala, which responds to strong emotionality. The extraordinary thing about Tony Blair’s flashbulb memory is that nothing much actually happened. So when the bully came upon the young Blair unexpectedly, “I turned on him and told him I would hit him if he didn’t stop. He could tell I meant it, because I did and my eyes would have shown it – so he stopped.” So in this flashbulb memory all that really happened was that the bully was stopped dead in his tracks. Nobody got badly beaten; no one was kicked and stamped upon; few punches, if any, were thrown. Blair’s understanding of the situation is that it taught him something about courage, but from a psychology point of view it tells you more about the intense fear that the young Blair must have felt at that moment, plus the fact that he was surprised at his own actions in standing up to the bully. He didn’t have to fight back physically, but he found a way of dealing with his own fear.

The point about flashbulb memories, of course, is that, because of the way they have been encoded by the brain, they stay vivid for ever. And it just so happens that, because they are so accessible, we rate vivid memories, and events that are easy to visualise, as more common than events that are hard to visualise. As a consequence of this, perhaps threat generally was perceived as more prevalent in Tony Blair’s subsequent life – in the same way that those who have survived bad car crashes, and have the resulting flashbulb memory, view the roads as more dangerous places than those who have not had the same experiences. Perhaps, his firm response (that look), directly encoded in the brain, was from then on set as the natural associative response to any threat.

It would be fascinating to know if this bit of “character development” had not happened, and if this flashbulb memory had not been laid down, how Tony Blair would have dealt with all the other threats and bullies (he perceived) in the world along the way, and whether the world today would be a much more dangerous or a much safer place, as a consequence.

Discussion with Philip Zimbardo, researcher who conducted the Stanford Prison experiment in The Believer. Touches on punishment and responsibility.

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Andrew Gimson writing in The Telegraph yesterday:

One of the Prime Minister’s weaknesses as a debater is that he so seldom dares to think on his feet. Tony Blair liked to seize some novel thought or suggestion and send it winging back in modified form towards his interlocutor: Mr Brown just treats whatever anyone else says as an unwelcome distraction from the tedious Brownite orthodoxy, which then has to be repeated at inordinate length in an attempt to wear everyone else down.

GB’s weaknesses are endlessly anatomised at the moment. His reputation as the Iron Chancellor is long gone – Mandy has his work cut out.

Interesting article on how the ability to defer gratification varies and how important a skill or capacity it is:

From Jonah Lehrer’s article on research into self-control in The New Yorker:

“This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?” According to Mischel, even the most mundane routines of childhood—such as not snacking before dinner, or saving up your allowance, or holding out until Christmas morning—are really sly exercises in cognitive training: we’re teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires. But Mischel isn’t satisfied with such an informal approach. “We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’ ”

Very good precis and discussion of the article from Patricia Marino.

From The Daily Telegraph, January 2009, some dubious ‘research’ on the link between where people choose to sit and personality:

Forward-minded people tend to sit at the front of the top deck, according to Dr Tom Fawcett of Salford University, the independent-minded in the middle and those with a rebellious streak at the rear.

Reminds me of Jung speculating on the different characteristics displayed by groups in the US – Californians can be substituted for top front seat choosers….

Oliver Burkeman on stimulating the intellect | Life and style | The Guardian

But there’s another barrier to iconoclastic thinking: fear. Once you’ve jolted your brain on to a new path of thought, pursuing it further – either in your head or by acting on it – will stimulate the fear of uncertainty, failure or disapproval. I’ve often wondered if this is why many people get their best ideas in the shower, or why I get them on trains and planes – contexts where you can’t physically put an idea into practice and so, for the time being, can’t fail, either. Iconoclasts find ways to coexist with their fears, Berns says. It’s by learning that skill, and by actively seeking unfamiliar experience, that we non-iconoclasts can emulate them.