Today: The Day to Do Something

My friend, Dr. Robert Fisch, often reflects on his life by remembering an old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Dr. Fisch’s “curse” included living amid the “interesting times” of the Holocaust, Soviet oppression, and the clinical challenges of working as a pediatrician with children presenting with the devastating disease of phenylketonuria (PKU). However, part of Dr. Fisch’s story includes rising to these challenges of his time. He resisted the Holocaust and Soviet oppression, and he found a way to help treat PKU. In these ways, Dr. Fisch ultimately contributed to a more humane and just world.

Dr. Fisch with my family, December, 2011

The past two years have clearly been “interesting” and maybe feel “cursed” as well. COVID impacted every facet of our lives from early 2020 to Spring of 2021. Racial tensions became more evident with the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning that followed. Political polarization drove people apart and contributed to an insurrection on our democracy on January 6, 2021. And, now, within a matter of days, we’re learning we face a “different virus,” to quote Dr. Anthony Fauci, that has the potential to upend life again. Finally, we’ve faced a heat, drought, and regular bout of air quality alerts that awakens us, if we haven’t been awakened before, to the reality of climate change in my state of Minnesota.  

These are historic challenges. I can imagine a day when my children or grandchildren may look back at these times we’re living in at this time as if they presented a set of forks in the road. “We the people” and we individuals each have choices to make about what futures we will create, the sides of history on which we will stand. As Dr. Fisch has said:

“Yesterday is past. Tomorrow is a wish. Today is the only time in which to do something.”

Advertisement

When We Can’t Agree on Scientific Facts

The challenges of this time humble me as a science writer and educator. As I participate in discussions about many of the most serious and pressing problems now facing our country and world – problems ranging from vaccine hesitancy to racism, from race relations to climate change – one overarching meta-problem frequently recurs. Coming from different universes of information and social comparison, we don’t agree on the relevant facts.

Theodore Parker once stated that facts are “true, independent of all human opinion.” That is, although we may have wishes for what’s true, previous beliefs about what’s true, and groups telling us what’s true, none of this compares with what’s actually true. Reality has a life of its own.

In the past, we could at least sometimes come together as a people, even if we disagreed on initial solutions to problems, because we agreed on relevant facts. This has largely changed. As a result, we are increasingly polarized and fractured, often incapable of consensus, compromise, civil discourse, and creative problem-solving.

One of the purposes of education is to prepare us to be able to separate fact from fiction. Since many of the problems noted above concern questions about how the world works, science education, in particular, seems at least partly to blame.

What do we need to be able to do to think critically, especially in the scientific realm, as we wrestle with the problems of this time? Below are six essential skills we need as citizens, at least as a start.

Three Updates to Psychology Courses for Fall, 2020

According to the most recent data available, approximately 30% of American high school students take a course in Psychology. In addition, approximately 1.2-1.6 million American students take an Introductory Psychology course in college every year.

To the extent we have control over our curriculum, we who teach Psychology courses have a unique opportunity and responsibility during the fall of 2020: we can help educate a significant slice of American youth about some of the behavioral and psychological aspects of the great challenges defining this time. We can encourage greater insight and inspire prosocial change.

Below are three topics we can integrate into our fall courses that are particularly timely and important, with some suggestions for how to do so.

1. The psychology of group behavior.

COVID-19 spreads through droplets, yes, but those droplets spread from person to person through specific behaviors. Racial inequality is systemic, yes, but systems stem from, and are maintained, by specific behaviors. Climate change is a widely considered a “threat multiplier,” a meta-problem that increases the likelihood of pandemics and many other social problems; it also is caused by specific behaviors.

We teachers of Psychology can focus on individual differences in behavior and why individuals do what they do, and each of the above problems can be fruitfully explored from this level of analysis. However, if there ever was a time to explore the psychology of group behavior, this is it, as each of the above current problems also demonstrates how behavior is powerfully determined by the norms of individuals’ groups.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Race

Like so many, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about race relations, particularly in my community. The death of George Floyd shocked so many of us, myself obviously included. It’s been difficult to know how to respond.

One response we as a family felt strongly about was to visit the site of the killing as well as the site of the major rioting, so that we could discuss race intentionally for at least a morning. This isn’t sufficient, of course, but it is a continuation and recommitment for us. Visiting places I’ve hung out at my whole life – but seeing it transformed in the aftermath of a now global event – was surreal. It was eerily quiet. Sacred.

More recently, my friend and former student, Whitney Harper, approached me with the idea for a blog entry for Psychology Today. We published it today, and you can find it below. There’s so much more to say, but here are some of our thoughts.

***

“You might think that the world is made of atoms, but the world and, in particular, human history and the moment we’re living right now, is made out of stories.”

-John Powell, Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC-Berkeley, as quoted in a recent episode of the Science of Happiness podcast

An increasing body of research shows how central narratives are to human experience. We all create stories to make sense of experience, and these stories go on to determine how we frame our lives, our contexts, and our decisions about the future. When we encounter a person or situation, we intuitively interpret and narrate as we place this person or situation in the context of past experiences, making connections and judgments automatically. For example, when I interact with a man in his 20’s who is wearing boat shoes and pastel clothing, I have a certain narrative framework that gets triggered about what his background might be, what he does with his free time, and how he feels about certain political issues – stories and stereotypes that have been (rightly or wrongly) constructed and associated with these fashion choices.

Narrative theory goes beyond analyzing automatic associations, though, and also helps us make sense of larger, complex stories of past, present, and future. For example, when I (Whitney) am in a fight with my sister, I understand our current conflict within a wider narrative. I know from the past that we need to take space and cool off because we both got this wonderful trait from our dad that makes it so we have to have the last word; I know from the present what is going on in each of our lives and what else is weighing on us and on our relationship; and I know that no matter what, I do not want to lose our future relationship (regardless of how wrong I think she is).

Narrative theory also looks at interactions between people as inherently situated within the larger structures of society. For instance, my relationship with my sister is also informed by the narratives of what being “sisters” and “family” mean – narratives that can change and take on different meanings across cultures, and that have been built up across history. Of course, in the middle of fighting, I may not think about the layers of narratives that play into it (I often am much more focused on my next response and how I can shut my sister down) – but the point is that this complex history of being sisters deeply impacts my current interactions.

Similarly, narrative theory can help us make some sense of the multi-layered, complex narratives surrounding race relations in the United States today. When we address racial inequality in the United States, we often frame these discussions in terms of “racist” vs. “not racist” or “color-blind,” but research points to how reality is much more complicated than these labels allow for, and shows that the racialized frameworks developed throughout our history continue to frame our interactions today even in situations where we have little to no awareness of their impact. When we become more aware, changing these narratives becomes more possible.

As Chimamanda Adichie explains in her TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” it matters greatly where we begin our stories. If we begin to tell the story of race with the Black man we see on the news who was brought into custody because of armed robbery, we arrive at one perspective. If our story of race begins with the recent police violence and the arrest of George Floyd, we arrive at another perspective. But, imagine if we recognize the history of race in America, and begin the story with colonialism, slavery, or hundreds of years of frustration among people of color in the United States. We gain a completely different and potentially more grounded and contextualized perspective, one that helps us make better sense of why a white police officer, with knowledge that he is being filmed, kills a Black man in broad daylight with seemingly little to no fear of repercussions.