Friday, January 27, 2017

In Flint, the Psychology of Disaster

From a long New Yorker article about the possible public uses of behavioral science, this bit about the aftermath of Flint's lead-in-the-water crisis:
Later, Key shared a personal story about the son of a family friend who had begun acting out in school. The boy’s mother had come to Key for help. When Key asked the boy what was going on, he replied, “Well, they said I’m not going to be smart anyway.”

“These kids are internalizing the messages about how the lead is affecting them,” Key said. “If there is a direct correlation between lead exposure and the cognitive ability to handle stressful situations in a reasonable way, and we see more violent trends, can you imagine the pipeline of youth who are going to be going into the corrections system?”
If behavioral research teaches us anything, it's that believing you are a stupid failure almost guarantees that result. Kevin Drum comments:
This is yet another tragedy. Children in Flint had mildly elevated levels of lead in their bloodstream for about a year or two. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but the effects of this are fairly modest. To put it in terms most people will recognize, it means that some children in Flint will lose about one IQ point. Maybe two. That's a tragedy, but it's an even bigger tragedy if kids and their parents respond to this by thinking their lives are permanently ruined. The truth is that in nearly all children, the effects will be barely noticeable.

I don't know what the right response is here. On the one hand, nobody pays attention unless you yell and scream and demand attention. If it weren't for this, authorities would have ignored Flint even longer than they did. On the other hand, the effects of all this yelling and screaming can be disastrous in the long term if residents end up with the belief that Flint's kids are now all destined for a life of misery and cognitive decline.
I remember reading something similar about PTSD in the military. As I have written here before, combat has terrible psychological effects, especially prolonged combat. I think that ought to be widely known and political leaders should consider it before sending soldiers into battle. On the other hand the traumatic effects of war seem to have gotten worse since we started talking about it all the time, which in the US was around 1970. Not only were more Vietnam vets psychologically damaged than vets from earlier wars, but those who fought late in the war did worse than those who fought in 1964-1967. Telling people "my god something horrible happened to you and you're likely to be scarred for life" is not always a great way to help them recover.

This is just a special case of a widespread, profound problem, which is that the political and psychological approaches to life are often at odds. Sociology and economics tell us that people who grow up in poor neighborhoods are vastly more likely to end up poor, and we talk about this to agitate for a political solution. But on a personal level, the people who do make it out of bad neighborhoods are mostly the ones who believe, despite the evidence, that they can achieve anything they put their minds to. Or consider "micro-aggressions." I can certainly believe that a lifetime of small snubs, often unintentional, can add up to a serious problem. But on the other hand focusing on those slights is exactly what psychologists tell their patients not to do; as I always say, the world is full of thousands of messages, so why focus on the negative ones when there are plenty of  positive ones out there you could dwell on instead? Carried to an extreme, believing that the people around you despise you and keep letting their scorn slip in little ways is mental illness. But if we give everyone the psychologically correct message, can we ever do anything politically about the problem? If we don't yell and scream and  demand attention, the problem probably endures, but every time we raise our voices we give people more reason to obsess about slights, real or perceived.

The only answer I have to these conundrums is to be reasonable, honest, and fair, as best we can. But then people like me have been saying that for centuries.

2 comments:

G. Verloren said...

"Sociology and economics tell us that people who grow up in poor neighborhoods are vastly more likely to end up poor, and we talk about this to agitate for a political solution. But on a personal level, the people who do make it out of bad neighborhoods are mostly the ones who believe, despite the evidence, that they can achieve anything they put their minds to."

Yet there are plenty of individuals from poor neighborhoods who put their minds to exactly that and still never get anywhere regardless. A positive attitude is often necessary, but it alone isn't sufficient.

You almost always also need a lucky break - someone else recognizing your potential and taking a chance on you. You need some person whom you've never met sitting in an office looking at 100 essentially identical applications for a position that has only 10 openings to just so happen to choose yours over others.

People will tell you that the key is to "Stand Out", but that's no guarantee. The 99 other applicants were told exactly that as well, and collectively you all managed to stand out compared to the initial 1,000 applicants you were pared down from. You can be the top 10% of your group, and yet you still only have a 10% chance of being accepted. And if acceptance means the difference between having your tuition paid or not, that means the difference between your going to college or not is effectively random.

G. Verloren said...

Or consider "micro-aggressions." I can certainly believe that a lifetime of small snubs, often unintentional, can add up to a serious problem. But on the other hand focusing on those slights is exactly what psychologists tell their patients not to do; as I always say, the world is full of thousands of messages, so why focus on the negative ones when there are plenty of positive ones out there you could dwell on instead?

The problem here is that people don't stop abusing others unless enough people stand up against the abuse. It's all well and good for the individual to focus on the positive instead of the negative, but it doesn't change society. Accepting injustice may put you under less psychological strain if you can't escape from such treatment, but it doesn't cure the injustice itself and simply ensures more people down the line will have to face the exact same injustice.

The point of discussing micro-aggressions is to help recognize that certain behaviors are the results not of obvious singular events, but of countless smaller overlooked ones. It's a tool for understanding that some human reactions do not, in fact, come out of nowhere, and that there are warning signs for pretty much everything.

Now, that's often of limited use to the individual. If a man comes home from work every night and beats his wife, it's not much comfort to her to explain that his violence is the product of a lifetime of being told he isn't good enough, and the micro-aggressions of his coworkers in his competitive job are what sends him over the edge he constantly teeters on.

But on the flipside, just expecting the man to "get over" a lifetime of micro-aggressions isn't remotely helpful either. He doesn't need to just toughen up and accept the abuses of his coworkers so he can stop beating his wife, he needs to remove himself from the toxic environment of his job so he can face his demons and heal.

Now ideally, the man's coworkers would be held accountable and would be made to stop their abuses, however minor they might seem, and instead support him. But that's never going to happen if they can't even conceive of the effect their actions are having - if they just dismiss the notion entirely, because their behaviors are so "minor" that they can't imagine them causing problems.

Hence the imporatance of focusing on and talking about micro-aggressions. The man's coworkers can't understand the need to change their behavior until they are made to understand that they are causing harm. And the culture of expecting the individual to simply "accept" micro-aggression and to "focus on positive things instead" only serves to give everyone besides the individual reason not to care, and the excuse to not make any effort to change their behavior.

Remember, when women first started talking about gender equality, men found it obnoxious in exactly the same way. Why focus on the negative aspects of being a woman? Focus on the positive! You'll be much happier! Stop badgering me to let you vote, and enjoy the new necklace I just bought you! Just leave me alone and stop asking me to change my behavior, even if only in minor ways! You'll just make yourself miserable getting hung up on every little thing!

The first step toward curing injustice is talking about injustice. People have to be made to understand that something is wrong before they are willing to do anything to change it.

That's what going on now with micro-aggressions. People are talking for the first time about how our society is full of shitty little behaviors, and we need to stop constantly being shitty to each other, even in minor ways. Only once people accept this fact and embrace it will we manage to change our behavior.