Human behavior . . .

HUMAN MOTIVATION is incredibly complex. Attempts to tweek with it are invariably mis-directed. Esther Inglis-Arkell's article at io9, "The lasting mystery of the Hawthorne Effect" is worthy of  attention.

The Hawthorne Effect is cited by both business experts and psychology experts, but rarely in the same way. Some say it's real, some that it's real but misinterpreted, and then others that it doesn't exist and never has. It all started with an attempt to increase productivity at a factory in the 1920s, and we've been arguing about it ever since. 

The story of the Hawthorne Effect begins in the 1920s, when productivity studies began at the Hawthorne Works electrical equipment factory in Illinois. They continued for the better part of a decade, with investigators tweaking nearly every aspect of working life.

— The Home Office —

Social perspectives . . .

WHAT DO DEBUTANTE BALLS, the Japanese tea ceremony, Ponzi schemes and doubting clergy all have in common? According to NEW STATESMAN, Daniel Dennett's article "The social cell", they are results of interaction that mimics the behavior of biological cells.

Cells may be the simplest life forms on the planet - even the simplest possible life forms - but their inner workings, at the molecular level, are breathtakingly complex, composed of thousands of molecular machines, all of them interacting to provide the cell with the energy it needs to build offspring and maintain its membrane. Echoes of the design wisdom embodied in this very effective machinery can be found in human culture, which is dazzlingly complex, too, composed as it is of about seven billion interacting people, with their traditions, languages, institutions, occupations, values and economies. Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution.

Consider four unrelated species of social cell that share some interesting features. What do the Japanese tea ceremony, debutante parties, Ponzi schemes and many Christian churches have in common? They are all variations of an insidiously effective social mechanism that:
1) thrives on human innocence, and
2) nobody had to design, and
3) is threatened with extinction by the rising tide of accessibility to information.

Interesting way of looking at social process; to me, a variation on Transactional Analysis of Eric Berne, but that's just my initial consideration. One's own internal motivation is whatever it is. Human consciousness, the mind, is so complex that it is essentially unfathomable for the precise definition of consciousness as each person is unique — is my consciousness the same as yours, or anyone else's? Certainly we have a myriad of mind-sets and attitudes, and nobody knows why they are what they are.

Generalizations are always suspect, but people repeat behavior if there's a reward. They may be unaware of just what that reward is — and that's where the fun starts. One of the essential components of the standard human mind are the capacities for wishful thinking and self-deception; add them to the behavior-determination process in the mind, and it gets even funner.

Gender gyre . . .

THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT has a fine book review by Carol Tavris, "The new neurosexism", a review of "DELUSIONS OF GENDER", by Cordelia Fine. Apparently, a lot of recent literature on the mental differences between men and women is rather suspect. Tavris points out the book's importance:

Today we look back with amusement at the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to weigh, cut, split or dissect brains in their pursuit of finding the precise anatomical reason for female inferiority. How much more scientific and unbiased we are today, we think, with our PET scans and fMRIs and sophisticated measurements of hormone levels. Today’s scientists would never commit such a methodological faux pas as failing to have a control group or knowing the sex of the brain they are dissecting – would they? Brain scans don’t lie – do they?

Well, yes, they would and they do. As Cordelia Fine documents in Delusions of Gender, researchers change their focus, technology marches on, but sexism is eternal. Its latest incarnation is what she calls “neurosexism”, sexist bias disguised in the “neuroscientific finery” of claims about neurons, brains, hormones.

“We have been here before, so many times”, writes Fine, with a sigh. No one disputes that the sexes differ physiologically, in hormones and anatomy, or that there are sex differences in the brain related to men’s and women’s different reproductive processes. The eternal question is, and has been, so what? What, if anything, do those differences have to do with work, love, success, ambition, talent, love of sports, and who does the housework? Perhaps they do, says Fine, but “when we follow the trail of contemporary science we discover a surprising number of gaps, assumptions, inconsistencies, poor methodologies, and leaps of faith – as well as more than one echo of the insalubrious past”.

Why money messes with your mind

THE NEW SCIENTIST has a fascinating article by Mark Buchanan, "Why money messes with your mind". Worth the read, even if you don't get paid. The picture is a section of our $20 bill. Love those guys — looks like Mr. Big just dropped a wicked salmon-fart, and the crew are not enjoying the experience.

Simply thinking about words associated with money seems to makes us more self-reliant and less inclined to help others. And it gets weirder: just handling cash can take the sting out of social rejection and even diminish physical pain.

Our relationship with money has many facets. Some people seem addicted to accumulating it, while others can't help maxing out their credit cards and find it impossible to save for a rainy day. As we come to understand more about money's effect on us, it is emerging that some people's brains can react to it as they would to a drug, while to others it is like a friend. Some studies even suggest that the desire for money gets cross-wired with our appetite for food. And, of course, because having a pile of money means that you can buy more things, it is virtually synonymous with status - so much so that losing it can lead to depression and even suicide. In these cash-strapped times, perhaps an insight into the psychology of money can improve the way we deal with it.

From the New Scientist

THE NEW SCIENTIST SITE IS A GREAT RESOURCE for those who like to be au courant about all sorts of stuff scientific.

Born believers: How your brain creates God,
by Michael Brooks, is an interesting look at the basic propensity of the human mind to conjure up the god concept.

An alternative (to religion-as-an-adaptation theory) being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. "There's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired," says Bloom.

Much of that evidence comes from experiments carried out on children, who are seen as revealing a "default state" of the mind that persists, albeit in modified form, into adulthood. "Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life," says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.

. . . . .

The ability to conceive of gods, however, is not sufficient to give rise to religion. The mind has another essential attribute: an overdeveloped sense of cause and effect which primes us to see purpose and design everywhere, even where there is none.