#45 PSYCHOLOGY'S SECRET: we have WMDs...

Do you ever feel you’re being watched, or followed? Do you think there may be a conspiracy to put CCTV cameras on every street in the land? You may not be imagining these things: we have ways…..of finding out about your behaviour without you even knowing.

Let me begin at the beginning: Psychology has always wanted to be a science. This is a bit like Gareth Southgate (the new England football manager) saying there’s no reason why England shouldn't aim to win the World Cup. Oh yes there is:  it's wishful thinking. Psychology claims to be a science because it uses scientific methods. Southgate again: ‘we aim to play like the Brazilians and the Germans combined’. Aiming to do something in a particular way is not the same thing as achieving it.

The problem is that, unlike other sciences, we are working with moving targets: not slivers of tissue on microscope slides, or predictable cogs in a machine, but people. Here’s the snag: people are people, just as Brexit is Brexit, and who knows WTF that means?  The one thing it does mean is that people can always behave as they want to and are therefore essentially unpredictable.

Put yourself in the position of a participant in a psychology experiment. The nice man who asked you to help him said it will only take a minute (first lie), you would remain anonymous and you wouldn’t be hurt or humiliated. Well he was hardly going to say that you would be, was he? Oh, and you could leave it at any time (like anyone could have escaped from Colditz at any time, if they really tried hard). What are you thinking as you are led into the room, where some other people are already waiting? Never mind the fact they may either be innocent lambs, or confederates of the experimenter who will be working from a ‘script’ to have a certain kind of effect on you. The first thing you are going to think is ‘what is going on here, what’s this going to be about, and what am I supposed to do? Hope I don’t embarrass myself’.

People in this set-up react in many different ways, from one extreme – being absolutely compliant with what they take to be the requirements of the experiment, or the researcher’s wishes, to the other extreme of being resolutely determined not to be manipulated by this nerd in glasses who is wearing a fleece with a collar and tie, with spilt food on it. (It is true that some academics dress better than this, but I’m trying to paint a picture here). And there are countless other possible reactions in between these extremes: idiosyncratic ones, personality/mental health ones, bloody-mindedness, boredom, lets-get-this-over-with-quickly-I-need-the-loo ones etc.    So what is this pure scientific experiment actually measuring?  Almost everything except natural, typical, ordinary, replicable human behaviour that you would see in real life when the people were not being closely observed in a totally artificial situation which was directly affecting that behaviour.

Books have been written about this: how the demographic characteristics of both observer and observed (amongst many other things) result in different demand characteristics.  For example, the very fact that the study is taking place in a prestigious University will make some participants ‘be on their best behaviour’ and not ‘let themselves down’. Others will assume all academics are ‘raving Lefties’ and avoid arguments by concealing their own right-wing views.

This is where it crosses over into Real Life. The political opinion polls in the US and the UK have been resoundingly wrong in the last year or so. Unexpected election results (i.e. opposite to poll predictions) have brought political climate change to a traumatised Western world. Why? Because people haven’t told the truth: Many Brexiteers have been unwilling to admit that they were anti-immigrant, Trumpeters have not wanted to be publicly associated with such a crass and disgusting person, while privately thinking he might be just the man to kick Washington politicos up the backside. They lie because they’re guessing that their lie is what the interviewer wants to hear; or they just want their vote to be private and take some pleasure in screwing up the poll. If I were in the survey/opinion poll industry, I would be retraining for a career change, at the moment it’s looking dead in the water.

Psychologists have tried to get around their problem by ingenuity: what if the participants are observed when behaving naturally because they were unaware that they are being observed? Nice, but maybe a little voyeuristic and without their permission – surely intrusive and unethical? Go tell your local council busy sticking CCTV cameras on every free lamp-post (Well, you always wanted to be on TV – you got it!). It would be so much better if the cameras had a voice-track: “Oi, you in the dodgy turquoise tracksuit, yes YOU, leave that car alone, it’s not yours”.

It occurs to me that in my absence (I have been out of Psychology for some years) social psychology may have changed radically: no more need for dragging unwilling participants into some fake set-up in the laboratory: just apply for access to a bank of CCTV cameras in a shopping centre and go from there: have your stooges ‘accidentally’ drop things on the pavement and see how many people return them; see how that varies by age, gender, ethnicity, social class, similarity between ‘victim’ and ‘helper’, attractiveness of either or both, and any number of other variables.

 Harmless? Yes, in most ways, but all done without the participants’ permission. What if it had been you who ignored the victim’s plight? You might have many reasons for not stopping but there you are, in a still from the video in the textbook, the TV documentary, or the magazine, the icon of selfish, heartless lack of concern.

Give me half an hour and I could come up with half a dozen research projects which would use this paradigm, three Ph.D topics and a couple of major research grant applications. And so economical: thousands of trials could be run in the time it took to run a handful, when we used to have to do it ‘by hand’; young people today, they don’t realise how lucky they are, why, in my day……

This kind of strategy is called an unobtrusive measure. They are hard to set up, but some of them are based on the principle that when we enter into a social situation we sometimes leave something behind or take something away which registers the fact of our behaviour: smokers leave fag-ends, burglars leave fingerprints and take away valuables. 

Those are obvious but there are more subtle ones: a museum director wanted to know which were her most popular exhibits and to ascertain whether they were in the most favourable position. A survey would be punitively expensive and people might only mention the best-known ones, those that they were ‘supposed to’ like best. The Director solved it when she hit on the idea of measuring the remaining tread on the carpet tiles in front of each exhibit. This indicated not only the ‘number’ of visitors to each one, but also their degree of interest – because people do not stand still, they move from foot to foot, viewing angle to angle and stay for longer or shorter periods, all wearing out the carpet more. Individually negligible but collectively telling. Not perfect, but very clever, and almost free…

Can you think of any ‘unobtrusive measures’ of human behaviour? If so, leave a note in the Comments section at the end of the post. Gwan…

Honestly, it is only now that I realise I have been conducting a study so unobtrusive that even the researcher himself did not realise he was doing it: the simple, natural process of checking how a post on a blog is doing by checking how many hits or views it has attracted. Now read on….

The Sunday Items was first published last January. I would like to record that it took the Net by storm, but that would be a very slight exaggeration. For many months it poodled along, getting 100 – 150 hits per week. Possibly it occurred to The Proprietor, Mr Rupert MerdeOK, that it was never going to outsell the Sun On Sunday, and it was uneconomic. Certainly the Editor was concerned that although it was good to reach all those people, it was a great deal of effort for the less-than-viral Sunday Items to be produced. The truth is that about 6 weeks ago I considered winding it up, or at least going fortnightly to halve the work.

Then it changed. A month ago, a post which was an attempted coup de grace on Trump, literarily speaking, attracted 460 hits, more than triple the usual figure. Sensing a sea-change, the Editor devoted the next issue to Cats, one of his own very favourite animals, second only to dogs, and a stupendous 1520 people viewed it, nearly quadrupling the Trump figure again. The next week, ‘War’ got 1750 hits and last week’s elegy to ‘Love’ reached 1777. What can account for this surge in interest?  More advertising on Facebook, and recruitment of FB Friends have probably played a part, but beyond that the same process that makes things go viral – sharing. Not so much a virus more an irritating little infection, a DTD (digitally transmitted disease). Long may ye pass it on to each other…

A picture is worth 1000 words, (or in The Editor’s case 3-5,000 words: thank you for that tactful hint, Ms Barcode).

Does the variation between the last few issues tell us anything? It suggests that the Trump issue was of more interest to readers than any of the previous 39 issues, by a factor of 3.  This was slightly troubling, though I suppose we knew that however gross and disgusting he is, he’s good box office. Even more worrying, for a few days it looked like the issues on Love, and War would get less hits than Cats, giving considerable pause (sic) for thought. Is the moggy in the corner really more important to you than a nuclear holocaust, or that extremely fit person who smiled at you at the gym...and carried on smiling?

Thankfully not. Love conquered all and surpassed War by a very slight margin. So the two most important topics, in a real sense, came out (just) ahead of the pack. This is gratifying and bears out Freudian Theory’s argument that sex and aggression are the two main sources of motivation in human behaviour.  This resounding victory over other topics may cause a lot of psychoanalysts to cease their practice, in order to quit when their winning, or at least ahead, for the very first time. There are 101 possible objections to these interpretations (e.g the high 'war' vote ensured a comparable 'love' vote to show they were not militaristic monsters), but it's Christmas so feck all that malarkey.

But can it be true that Country music can be more popular than Cats? Surely not.....
Then again, if you could get a cat to play or sing country music it would certainly go viral. All I can find is a country song about a cat, and a fake-up of cats singing something other than country music:

HOMER SIMPSON and NIGEL FARRAGO

It has to be RUPERT MURDOCH (aka Rupert MerdeOK, aka The Proprietor) who goes to the Room of Shame. Although portraying himself as a bumbling old fool to the Select Committee, contrite and anxious to atone for his unknowing sins, (hacking celebrities, buying influence etc) claiming that "this is the humblest day of my life...", he is the man who has made a mountain of money hawking photographs of women's breasts, making The Sun by far the best selling paper in the UK. With that readership, he has a platform for his political opinions ('whatever makes me money') which successive party leaders have listened to intently.

"HOW Much? Fine, I'll do it..."

He has a degree of power and influence matched by no other single person. It is possible that the other occupants of Room 101, whatever their heinous sins, will not want to have to put up with Murdoch: it is their fervent hope that Jerry will cause him to over-evert himself, my only reservation about this being that he does not deserve such a pleasant exit.  Off you go, Rupe.

More than Three Wise Men:

The dynasty squats The Gallery this week: creations of 2016

Readers were promised two gifts: you must understand that the
Editor is not known for his generosity and regards Bill Gates as
a rash man who should conserve his money 'for a rainy
millennium'. However, The Editor has been generous with information,
sharing almost every last detail of his time on this planet with
the General Public – even though they never asked for it. Last
year he published his 'autoblography', which was entitled FESS.
One reviewer concluded "He has had a rich life  – in almost
everything but money".  She got that right. The Editor modestly
described the book as "The perfect gift for someone for whom
you are obliged to provide a present, but actually don't like very
much". Hard to argue with that.

FESS can be bought from the Amazon Kindle store at www.amazon.co.uk (just put FESS in the search box) very cheaply, or ordered in printed form from www.aboutfess.com.

The gift is simply to include a chapter of FESS in this post to see if you like it (another chapter is available on the website, www.aboutfess.com.). GIFT in the sense of free, not valuable.

(see end of post for extract)

In Another Life, The Editor ran charity quizzes, which were highly successful: a very good time was had by all, without exception.  Get in the Tardis and travel forward in time to Christmas Day: you have scoffed an unfeasible amount of dead bird (and all the trimmings) and you are already sick of Christmas spin-offs from TV soaps which aren't half as good as the ordinary episodes.  What to do? Have a quiz, courtesy of the Quizmeister General, free, gratis and for nothing. How so? He will post a complete quiz on the blog at 11am on Christmas Day, together with an answer sheet you can print off for each person. The quiz can be run from any computer, iPad or phone, with a Net connection. Clever people can run it through their TV with a lead that has an HDMI plug at each end. But you knew that.  Do it individually or do it in teams (more enjoyable for the less egocentric) but do do it.
At 9pm the answers will be put up on the blog, so there can be no cheating (but look out for the more competitive family members or friends who visit the WC seven times during the quiz, carrying their smartphone).  In keeping with the origins of this enterprise, there is also a charitable aspect: if you use it, you will have a complete quiz-kit available on-line: if you have a charity, cause, or issue that you would like to support with money, use the materials to run a local quiz-night. There is a kind of chemistry about these events which guarantees their success. At the University of Westminster it was by far the most popular social event of the year, and raised thousands of pounds for charity. A quiz is not just for Quizmas.


Here are a few sample questions, from another quiz, stupid..........with answers, as if you needed them.

The questions vary from quite simple, to include young players, to very hard in order to satisfy seasoned quiz contestants, and spread scores so that there will be a clear winner (though some tie-breaker questions are included). There is a wide spread of topics, many questions are pictorial, some musical, and so it is a multi-mode quiz.

In the early 1960s, my parents decided that we should go away for Christmas to a hotel, to save my mother all the work of a Christmas at home, just for once. We were booked into one on the outskirts of Oxford, an enormous Victorian Gothic pile which made you wonder what on earth was the source of the wealth that built it.

The hotel was quite impressive, if a little tired. However, even two days can seem quite a long time when you are not surrounded by your usual props. The television was monopolised by the ‘lifers’ and long-term prisoners, a.k.a residents. The games room promised much and delivered nothing except the aroma of its dying geraniums: a billiard table with no cues, a table-tennis table with no net, and a selection of disabled board games which had interbred. Cluedo, in exactly the kind of hotel which was made for a cheesy detective series, offered only peculiar criminal solutions:  “Is it the Jack of Hearts, with the chess piece, in the Angel, Islington?” The dartboard was new and very cheap with a bullseye you couldn’t pierce with a laser, let alone a flightless and blunted fairground dart.

Meals were a trial. It was as though they had been delivered by a soup-run charity for the homeless, in one of their vans on Christmas Eve, and re-heated ever since. My father was ready to sort out the manager (“For the money we’re paying…”) but I gleefully retailed to him what they did in prisons to the food of people they didn’t like, and he changed his mind. It’s amazing what you can pick up from the Readers’ Digest in the toilet.

The hotel brochure advertised ‘nightly entertainment’. This was an enterprising use of the word 'nightly', to mean the time of day when this entertainment happened, rather than the frequency. Christmas Eve passed without anything resembling conjuring tricks or cabaret. There was a rumour (though nothing in print) about something on Christmas Night called a Grand Gala. Not even a large apple was forthcoming let alone the stage show we had hoped for. It’s not that often that 60 people go to bed at 9.30 on Christmas Night, I suppose, but that will happen if it’s the best thing on offer.

There was entertainment on Boxing Night. People gathered in the Dining Room at 8pm, to find it transformed into a Dining Room plus a Few Lame Decorations. A dancing area had been created by pushing a few tables back. My father selected one of these for us, perilously near the action. I smelled danger. But what on earth was I going to do for the whole evening while all the middle-aged people glided round the floor with that ridiculous 1930s film star, dreamy, faraway look in their eyes? 

After a little while someone smiled and waved at me from the next table which I pretended I hadn’t seen: strange how women of my parents’ generation wave differently from other people. It was the girlish way my mother used to wave to camera when my father insisted on making a “Story of our Holiday” epic with his first cine camera. The next thing was that the waver was dipping down between my parents, talking to them. I couldn't lip-read what she was saying, partly because I couldn’t lip-read, and partly  because her scarlet lipstick had been applied by a standard 11 inch paint roller, and so liberally that it was all over her teeth, making the movement of lips indecipherable. Besides, her raven black hair, which must have accounted for a whole tin of Kiwi shoe polish, hung slightly over her face.

But I knew. Of course I knew, she was looking in my direction the whole time.  But my beloved parents betrayed me: they hadn’t said “It’s very nice of you, but he’s 14, very shy, can’t dance, would barely come up to your waist, and would rather put out his own eyes with a blunt chisel than dance with a sad old paedophile lush with the delusion of a resemblance to Lauren Bacall".  Instead they just said “you’d better ask him”, knowing full well that I didn’t have the social skills to fend off the attentions of Jaws’ mother, scenting blood. I was dead. I downed my father's whisky in one, and bowed to my fate.

I mounted the scaffold pausing only to adjust the handcuffs which had appeared on my wrists. There was applause and the floor cleared, as though we were the star act. With one individual step in my dance repertoire (i.e. forward) it was hard to see how I was going to move round the dance floor. Anchored, I looked up for guidance. “I’ll show you, sweetheart”. I then felt a blow to the back of my head, one to the face, and everything went black.

To overcome any further resistance, she had pulled my head to her chest in a rather percussive way causing an impact between my nose and her sternum. Rather like parking a boat, bow to the dock, she had expertly parked my face between her breasts in a slot that was fit for purpose: her breasts were the kind of out-turned ones that look as though they may not be talking to each other. This stance was fine except if I ever wanted to breathe: while a slight inclination of the head in either direction opened air access for one nostril, it very decidedly closed off the other one.

Embarrassment, humiliation, melt-down, call it what you will, it’s a unique emotional state designed to make the human body experience everything it can. First the searing heat, comparable to a crematorium furnace, suffusing every atom, bouncing off the inside of the clothing then rushing to the face to escape in the form of heat, colour and sweat. The victim believes his skin is about to split like a boiled tomato, yet sweat and probably some tears will not be sufficient to extinguish the inevitable blaze that will break out of the fissure, as when an internal door bursts open in a house-fire. 

No sooner has this calamitous rise in body temperature peaked than it is replaced by an icy cold wave that engulfs him like an avalanche, as though some cruel prankster had tricked him into an ice bucket challenge inside of a wet-suit. It is intolerable. Paralysis, loss of speech, deep feelings of shame, and the conviction that vengeance must be visited upon the perpetrators and accomplices; and this trauma is so total and, well, traumatic, that the feelings can be vividly recaptured – even re-experienced 56 years later sitting in the car outside the supermarket, just thinking about it.

As it happened, there were no samurai swords or Uzis to hand, otherwise there would have been carnage surpassing the gorier scenes in 'Kill Bill' – starting with my family who had tried to conceal their mirth behind paper napkins. And of course, true to the samurai tradition, the shame and loss of dignity would have to conclude with my death by my own hand: hara-kiri, or self-filleting. I didn’t speak to my family for years after this episode, which I felt eloquently expressed my feelings.  

I have now forgiven them for the craven weakness which made them complicit in this crime against their youngest relative; he who had done nothing to deserve it, apart from possibly stealing someone's Easter egg chocolate when his own had been finished.

Several things were learned from this episode: parents are useless; drunk old ladies are more sexually voracious and brazen than several hen night parties, acting in concert; and that though you may think that being short and spotty, and half-submerged in an oversized Christmas sweater (with snowflakes and reindeer) at a glamorous Ball affords some kind of protection against sexual predators, you would be wrong. Very wrong indeed.

This is the first question from the Quizmas Quiz: Stuck? Try Google