Just don’t do it

A new study published in Psychological Science finds that it is healthier to let go of a cherished goal that is most likely unachievable than to stubbornly persevere against all probability of failure.

[P]sychologists followed teenagers for a full year. Over that time, individuals who did not persist obtaining hard to reach goals had much lower levels of a protein called CRP, an indicator of bodily inflammation. Inflammation has recently been linked to several serious diseases, including diabetes and heart disease, suggesting that healthy but overly tenacious teens may already be on the road toward chronic illness later in life.

Accordingly, Miller and Wrosch suggest it may be more prudent to cut one’s losses in the face of an insurmountable obstacle. “When people are faced with situations in which they cannot realize a key life goal, the most adaptive response for physical and mental health may be to disengage from this goal,” write the authors.”

Why cheat?

In light of the most recent round of cheating scandals in sports, The Boston Globe has an article that looks at the latest research on the psychology of cheating.  It begins by noting that “new research has found, people are prone to cheat even when it is not in their best interest. Instead of carefully weighing the costs and benefits of breaking the rules, people can be heavily swayed by peer pressure, their mood, their image of themselves. Sometimes, people even cheat out of a sense of fairness.”

One of the interesting findings is this last idea of cheating “out of a sense of fairness”:

Paradoxically, one of the most powerful motivations for cheating, according to scholars who study decision-making, is a desire for fairness. . . . In a way, this is common sense: If an opponent is illegally gaining some advantage over me, I’ll want to balance things out. But what’s more surprising is the way the effect extends beyond situations in which cheating confers an advantage. Robert Kurzban, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has found that players in a game he created are less likely to behave selfishly when they know that other players aren’t behaving selfishly, even though being the only player to behave selfishly actually increases one’s winnings at the game. That would suggest that most people, if they could be assured no one else was cheating, would be content not to cheat.

Another fascinating finding concerns a study that measured people’s propensity to cheat on a test.  Surprisingly, “the experimenters found a way to limit cheating that had nothing to do with the threat of getting caught. When they asked subjects to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember before taking the test, it virtually eliminated cheating.”

No light district

Spiegel Online reports that the German town of Bohmte is following the example of Drachten in the Netherlands by dismantling its traffic lights and signs. Moreover, the town is also getting rid of sidewalks, cobblestones will replace asphalt, and cycle and walking lanes will be distinguished from the car lanes only by color. The man inspiring these changes is the Dutch traffic expert Hans Monderman. His concept of traffic management is

road users have to negotiate their behavior with each other, rather than have it prescribed by rules — the idea being that people will pay more attention to what other road users are doing and hence cause fewer accidents.

Indeed, in Drachten, traffic accidents have reportedly declined dramatically since the implementation of Monderman’s ideas.

Dangerous parenting

The Timesonline website has an article about children and road safety in England. It reports that “The proportion of children who are never allowed to cross a road unsupervised has risen each year for the past five years. But the number of child pedestrians being killed is also rising.” One reason being offered is that parents are putting their children at risk by being overprotective.

The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety said that parents needed to understand the risks of being overprotective. Rob Gifford, the council’s director, said: “Parents should consider whether forbidding their children from crossing the road unaccompanied is exposing them subsequently to additional risk. They may not acquire the skills they need.

Clifford goes on to point out another irony:

He said that parents who tried to avoid exposing their children to road danger by driving them to school were contributing to a vicious circle.Drivers became less accustomed to seeing children on the streets and were therefore less prepared for the possibility of one suddenly stepping into the road.

Your cheating heart

A new book out, Lust in Translation by Pamela Druckerman, examines adultery around the world.  A review in Metapsychology Online Reviews points out some interesting facts revealed in the book.   One such fact is that Americans think of themselves as much more adulterous than they actually are.

Despite what we have all heard, married folks in America are actually wildly monogamous. In 2004, only 3.9 % of married men and 3.1% of married women engaged in extramarital sex in the past year (62). The figure that is often heard – that more than half of married men, and a quarter of married women will cheat on their spouses over their lifetime – turns out to be both highly problematic and overestimated.

Druckerman also suggests that part of our idea of ourselves as more adulterous than we actually are may have to do with the fact that an entire industry – the “marriage industrial complex” — has established itself in America to deal with the ‘exploding’ numbers of adulterers and their damaged marriages. This is, I believe, part of a larger trend: stated baldly, North America has become ‘addicted’ to therapy. In Canada, e.g., the number of licensed psychologists increased 52% from 1982 to 1997 (McLaren, 2000). Similarly, while there were only 3000 marriage and family therapists in the U.S. in 1970 (98), that number had risen to 50,000 by 2004 (100), a staggering 1600% increase!

The French, it turns out, are just as un-adulterous as Americans, only the French feel far less guilty about their adultery.  Throughout the Soviet era, the Russians were some of the most adulterous people in the world, which one Russian explained by saying, “Sex was the last thing they couldn’t take away from us, and that’s why we did it so much. Everyone had affairs with everyone.”  Old habits must die hard because, even today, they remain highly adulterous.  A tidbit about the Japanese would have been of interest to George Costanza: “Oddly, neither popular opinion nor the law in Japan considers sex with a prostitute to be an instance of adultery.”