DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT

A grocery checker in a nearby small town is very bossy.  She directs the other checkers, makes exceptions to store rules on the simple grounds that she knows better, and instructs even the customers that they are not doing things right.  I’ve never heard the managers correct her.  She is fat, rosy, very blonde, and totally confident that she is keeping order in a world that needs constant governing.  According to her, potent authority comes from being a small town girl (uncorrupted) and a mom (proof of value).  

I suspect it also comes from our small town education systems, which award good grades to those who obey little check lists of propriety rather than independent thought, or even admission that there are many ways to seek knowledge.  No longer do schools value democratic process or tolerate variability.  The point of college is only to get certification, like a technical vocation, and return to their hometown school to teach as their mother and grandmother did before them.  In these schools superintendents turn over every couple of years, because they bring unwelcome change.

I didn’t know there was a name for this syndrome until just now when I ran across an explanation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is a kind of spinoff or subsidiary of the kind of neurological research Joe LeDoux does on the amygdala:  how we react to threats.  We freeze in place, demonize outsiders, avoid new ideas — but the twist that D-K introduce is research that shows that we don’t KNOW we’re doing that.  

This is the article I read, which is pretty aggressive because the publication tends to the sensational.  https://www.rawstory.com/2016/08/a-neuroscientist-explains-what-may-be-wrong-with-trump-supporters-brains/

As psychologist David Dunning puts it in an op-ed for Politico, “The knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task — and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at the task. . . . Essentially, they’re not smart enough to realize they’re dumb.

"And if one is under the illusion that they have sufficient or even superior knowledge, then they have no reason to defer to anyone else’s judgment.”

I recognize this.  When I try to tell people what I know to be true but unfamiliar, they don’t just deny it — they deny that there is anything more to know than what they already know.  As far as they're concerned, I'm lying.  The most emotional example is trying to tell anyone in the village about the outside world.  They freak.  Their eyes flutter.

This is particularly true of writing.  The grand realm of thought and story accumulated over many centuries mean nothing to them.  They don’t think it is POSSIBLE for there to be other kinds of word and thought than what they know, nor can there be any thought without words.  (Sticking to their vocabulary, of course.)  Writing is conformity, endorsed by popularity.  

I keep thinking of the Peter Principle, which proposed that people rise to their level of marginal incompetence, which traps them there.  One of the ceilings on progress in this country is imposed by "Peters" in the management class, everywhere from corporations to grocery stores and esp. in governments.

The Dunning-Kruger phenomena was included in this article linked above explaining how anyone with brains and education can — incredibly! — defend Trump’s clown act.  It was illustrated in Valier by a man who constantly afflicted the town council with cockamamie theories about our water tower, our budgets, our streets and law enforcement.  Then he ran for mayor and WON, because he had gone from one household to another peddling gossip as truth.  No one questioned his competence to run a town.  Until the first town meeting when he couldn’t lead the Pledge of Allegiance, wanted the clerk to chair the meeting because he didn’t know Robert’s Rules of Order, and lost his temper the first time he was contradicted.  Luckily, this wave of emotion caused him to resign.  He seems to have no awareness that any of this is embarrassing and speaks Trumpishly of when he was the Mayor, as though it really happened.  The Wiki entry on Dunning-Kruger is worth reading.

There are a few corollaries to the Dunning-Kruger effect.  Terror Management Theory is relevant.  The idea is that people who are vulnerable to this effect have an actual brain difference:  they have larger and more reactive amygdalas, which means they are more easily scared and worried.  An fMRI can predict how conservative a person is by how much they react to threats.  I watched this at a meeting not long ago when the sheriff deflected questions about drug activity in Valier by introducing dramatic stories about drug activity on the adjacent reservation.  

Terror Management Theory proposes that:  “The inevitability of one’s death creates existential terror and anxiety that is always residing below the surface. In order to manage this terror, humans adopt cultural worldviews — like religions, political ideologies, and national identities — that act as a buffer by instilling life with meaning and value.

“Terror Management Theory predicts that when people are reminded of their own mortality, which happens with fear mongering, they will more strongly defend those who share their worldviews and national or ethnic identity, and act out more aggressively towards those who do not.”

Don’t think that this body of thought lets smart, educated, cosmopolitan people off the hook.  What the studies show is that these folks cannot understand that people in the grip of D-K really don’t have the ability to think, are constitutionally unable to realize that they aren’t seeing what more worldly folks take for granted.  The stuck thinkers simply seem willfully stupid.  It’s easy to view them with contempt, to not value them or their ideas — which they feel, of course, and resent.  What the stubborn know comes from television that has conditioned them to seek shock, sex, and superhuman powers — not realism.  

When they must represent their small community in the context of a much larger platform, they are paralyzed and leaders are happy to ignore them as bumpkins.  Those who program computer shows try to get the systems to operate as they did when watching television: passive, self-reinforcing, repetitious, habituated to violence and a narrow understanding of sex — all represented as righteousness and “giving you what you want.”

On the national level it is not easy to think of a remedy.  Both the ignorant and the informed are terrified by the possibilities.  What can reassure us?  I think it needs to be on the scale of a “religious” renewal that turns us away from trying to use wealth as safety, which it never is.  I think that our religious institutions themselves are too deeply invested in wealth and scare tactics to be of any use.  

Rather I look to science-based thought like Bioneers or justice-based movements coming out of race and gender indignation.  The ideas must be persuasive, visionary, and cross-culture — rich in image, full of narrative.  Happily, the research shows that when someone like the bossy grocery checker is somehow convinced that there is more to life than properly packing a brown paper bag, the scales may fall from their eyes.  They may understand that realizing the cosmos is unknowable for everyone and that everyone eventually dies, the closer they come to wisdom.

JOSEPH LEDOUX AND THE AMYGDALA

The Amygdaloids

Joseph LeDoux, vocals and guitar; Tyler Volk, lead guitar and vocals; 

Nina Curley, Bass; and Daniela Schiller, drums

It has taken a while to read enough material to understand how various the brain neuron researchers are and what that implies in terms of what they study.  More reading is necessary because things are happening so quickly and in so many different ways.  Joe LeDoux is quite explicit about dissecting out what he works on and why he thinks as he does.  So far as I know, he’s the only one with a band, the Amygdaloids, and the only one with a video blog.  He reminds me of Saul Bellow, which is partly about his stingy brim hat and partly about his clear openness.  http://www.amygdaloids.com

But he doesn’t spare sensibilities.  To locate the two amydalae, one on each side of the brain, he suggests one imagine an arrow thrust into the ear and another one thrust into the eye and where they meet, that’s where the amydala on that side is located.  Part of this little organ is almond-shaped, so the early anatomists gave it that name, but it turned out that there are other pieces attached to the “almond” which makes the organ quite differently shaped.  Also, it is tightly wired to the surrounding cortex with strands of neuron. 

There are basically two nerve systems in the body, so different that some of the controlled muscles are smooth (autonomic: guts) and some are striped (striated: voluntary muscles).  It has served me well that I took high school physiology from Miss Jean Hill at Jefferson in 1955.  A small brisk woman with a female partner, she made everything so clear and memorable that it has been a reliable foundation.  But now that scientists are tracing where the neuron impulses go and what they do, instead of relying on shapes of the tissues and physical connections, the autonomic systems turn out to be a little different from what we thought then.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/06/30/free-will-is-your-brain-the-boss-of-you-video/

Gazzinaga, another key brain neuron researcher.  A no-tie guy.  (California)

LeDoux does NOT address the issue of free will, nor the relationship between the tissue of the brain and the self-conscious mind, nor the functions of the pre-frontal cortex, nor the origin of consciousness, though all these are hot topics.  Rather he is focussed on the function of the amygdala, which appears to be the switchboard of the brain functions that are "under" consciousness, and yet are the great bulk of what goes on in the brain.  The brain NEEDS a switchboard because it’s real job is sorting and weighting the information that comes in through many different sources and channels -- then deciding what to do about it.  But the amygdala doesn't wait around for speculation: it just reacts.  REFLEXES. 

True enough, everything in the beginning comes from the world outside the skin through the sensory organs and cells, which are more subtle and ingenious that we ever knew.  The grid cells, compass cells, mirror cells, and others yet to be discovered, are in the prefrontal cortex.  The eyes and nose are so connected to the brain that some consider them brain parts.  And so on.  But two things are recent discoveries.  One is the many sorting “matrixes” or nexuses or what LeDoux calls “buffering” centers, at least as many as there are major senses, each with the power to edit, weight, or block neural information.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/08/20/how-does-our-brain-remember-video/

Eric Kandel, a bow-tie guy (NYC)

And another is that the amygdala gives priority to anything that would threaten survival: tigers, snakes, sudden strangeness in general.  It triggers reactions before a person even knows they will act.  The person doesn’t have control over this.  Some reactions appear to be hard-wired and some seem due to conditioning so intense and instant that it can never really be undone.  A little boy abused as a toddler before he is able to form enough brain function to remember consciously will, as an adult, react to that undermemory to the extent of his ability to fight, flight or freeze.  It cannot be erased.  If an abused kid was thought to be “safe” to molest because he hasn’t learned to talk, he might still be able to tell the story through his body’s reactions to the amygdala's monitors.

Moving on to another kind of memory is the complex in the hippocampi, two little “sea horses,” one over each ear.  This is where one stores sensory information, consciously acquired information, and memory of strategy that worked -- all the prefrontal cortex stuff.  The primary neuronal code that comes into the brain is routed by the thalamus to either the amygdala system or the hippocampus system.   After that, they don’t communicate, though the hippocampus system might remember the emotion connected to a memory. 

This is the way we understand it now, at least how I understand the enormous, complex and technical content of books like LeDoux’:   “The Emotional Brain: the Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life.”  It is rewriting, or at least reframing, the Freudian theories, which is very helpful in dealing with things like PTSD.  Until now these two systems of thought have been as separated as the two physiological systems, but they have a lot to say to each other.  Freud was frustrated by not being able to get at the very things our machinery can record now.

The following are the steps of how things from outside the skin are brought into the body and transformed into identity and “mind.”

Aplysia fasciata:  research sea slug

1. Physical responses to the environment are universal among all living things, even invertebrates.  It is the definition of “living.”  There is a constant flow of interactions in the body.  There is no such thing as “emotionless” in a living vertebrate creature.  Invertebrates have no amygdalas, but what the amygdala does is done in the cell. 

2.  Feelings are the reactions of the brain/body, the stuff that could be measured on a lie detector test, but aren’t necessarily conscious.  This is what LeDoux is getting at: that the changes perceived and recorded in the amygdala and the cerebral cortex surrounding it, plus the wiring that reaches into older parts of the brain clear back to the brain stem, partly because of evolution and partly because of evolving alternative ways of perceiving, is very DIFFERENT and not accessible to the hippocampus-mediated re-consolidated memories, which are themselves undependable.  (Not because they are lies, but because they are reassembled from various sources, not always in the same pattern and sometimes including extraneous material.)

3.  Emotion never stops but is overlain and restrained, formed into the person’s awareness of self and ability to project an idea of what to do.  Stress will throw people back to their earliest conditioned reflexes, especially those involving trauma.

Much fancier sea slug suggesting hair on fire!

4.  Naming the emotion (happiness, rage, sadness) happens after the emotion has become conscious.  But it can control behavior without ever having a name.  There have been three approaches to LeDoux’s sort of material.  One was the idea that all emotion was in the “limbic”  middle third of the brain.  The idea of the “limbic” came undone when there were too many cross-connections to claim the middle third of the brain was a separate entity.  Then there was the reflective idea that there were six or five or seven basic emotions, each managed by a different system -- but that fell apart.  Then there were theories about “arousal” -- sort of parallel to the Hans Selye idea of one basic unified response to stress.  So?  None really worked.

5. Behavior triggered by emotion can convert to something besides violence and more sophisticated than flight or freezing, but the emotion itself remains.  Fifty per cent of mental disorders are the result of fear and anxiety (“fear lite”) that are not quite managed well enough to keep them resolved.  FEAR is the big controller in our American “civilized” society even more than in the close-to-the-land villages of Africa.  I mean it is consciously and cynically used in politics, marketing and religion.

Do not mock or tease a kid in melt-down.

He will associate you with distress.  Give him space and, when he's ready, comforting.

6.  Social attitudes about the behavior produced by the emotion are both responsive and shaping.  How people react to strong emotion in others certainly influences their attempts to control themselves or even explain themselves.  But people rarely understand the basic physiological connections between a stimulus, the perception of it, and what the person has learned in a deep amygdalan way.  That is, in our culture we don't explain, comfort or make space.  Instead we come down hard on the behavior and try to extinguish it with punishment.  What we create is a gasoline piston which compresses the fuel until a spark sets off an explosion.  This is especially true for boys.

Most of LeDoux’s work is practical and at the cellular and molecular levels.  An amygdala has a dozen parts, only three of which control fear responses.   One of the three is connected directly to the brain stem, the earliest "brain" structure.  The team is using optogenetics to test many people so as to build a bell curve of reactions in different individuals.  Then the subjects are tested to see what different drugs can do.  In the past norepinephrine has been considered key.  The team sometimes uses propanalol, which was what sedated Michael Jackson to death.  It seems to shuts off fear.  Sometimes it's used to suppress stage fright.

Twenty per cent of the rat subjects failed to become conditioned by scientific funny business with shocks and barriers and rewards.  At first the experimenters thought they were Braveheart rats who had no fear, but more investigation revealed that they were actually feeling the fear, but somehow molecularly suppressing the reaction to it.  Is courage not being afraid or acting brave in the face of lethal danger?  For rats, we now know it might be either.  It was like the situation of the pigs routinely killed with succinylcholine because they looked so peaceful.  But they were only paralyzed.  Lie detector equipment revealed they were beyond terror, screaming inside.  

Like children assaulted but too afraid to show what they felt.  For the rest of their lives they will be trapped between terror and rage, denying both, looking for survival.  No wonder we recognize super monsters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRuUQiIgyj4    Using proper timing and drugs, we can now block memories, as described in this vid.  But, as usual, we have ethical issues.  More to read and think about.

ONE AGAINST THE WORLD

The Tao by Jennifer Baird

Let’s look at it this way:

The Tao or Way is specific to an ecology and is a person’s strategy for survival -- maybe more than that, like happiness and security.

If the survival is meant to be that of the group and if it is organized by and for the group, which has it’s own internal ecology, then it’s an institution.

If the survival is meant to be the individual, then it’s spirituality. ("Nones.")

Theology is rational, like math.  Formulas and therefores.  Spirituality is a feeling, but that doesn’t mean it’s not-real or other-worldly.  It is a totally involved feeling, when meaning is deeply subconscious as well as conscious.  It is bodily, as are all feelings.

A system or even a Way that works in one ecology might not work in a different one, not least because the material culture will not provide the right metaphors.  (Ex:  Inuit have no lambs, no trees for crosses, no bread, no wine.)

Because personal spirituality is ungoverned and probably ungovernable (though possibly evokable), it can oppose institutional religion and vice versa.  The institution will try to define and control “religion” as a form of governance.  Now consider this study below, which I’m editing for brevity.

Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation by Gregory S. Berns, Jonathan Chappelow, Caroline F. Zink, Giuseppe Pagnoni, Megan E. Martin-Skurski, Jim Richards.

“When individual judgment conflicts with a group, the individual will often conform his judgment to the group. Conformity may arise at an executive level of decision making, or it may arise because the social setting alters the individual’s perception of the world.

 Method: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a task of mental rotation in the context of peer pressure to investigate the neural basis of individualistic and conforming behavior in the face of wrong information.

Results: Conformity was associated with functional changes in an occipital – parietal network, especially when the wrong information originated from other people.  [They also tried the experiment with computers disagreeing.] Independence was associated with increased amygdalar and caudate activity, findings consistent with the assumptions of social norm theory about the behavioral saliency of standing alone. 

Conclusions: These findings provide the first biological evidence for the involvement of perceptual and emotional processes during social conformity.. . . a group of individuals is statistically more likely to make a better decision than any one person alone (Arrow 1963; Grofman and Feld 1988). But the superiority of the group disappears when individuals influence each other (Ladha 1992). Moreover, individuals may capitulate to a group, not as part of the social contract, but because the unpleasantness of standing alone makes the majority opinion more appealing than one’s own beliefs (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004). . .

An individual’s judgment has been assumed to reflect what that individual perceives (Coren and Enss 1993), but other factors can influence perception, such as categorization (Goldstone 1995) and social class (Stapel and Koomen 1997), indicating that perception is not simply a passive process.  . . . We hypothesized that if social conformity resulted from conscious decision- making this would be associated with functional changes in prefrontal cortex, whereas if social conformity was more perceptually based, then activity changes would be seen in occipital and parietal regions. . . . To induce conformity while performing the mental rotation task, participants were presented with the responses of four peers, who, unknown to the participant, were actors giving wrong answers half of the time.

Discussion

[Detailed information about which areas of the brain did what when the subject bowed to the outside opinions was redacted here.]

Of course, this does not rule out an executive decision-making process. . . . The vast majority of participants indicated that, at least on some trials, they went along with the external information because they thought that they had arrived serendipitously at the same correct answer. . .One possibility is that the external information created confusion in the participants’ minds where none existed before.

The Pain of Independence

Compared to behavioral research of conformity, comparatively little is known about the mechanisms of non-conformity, or independence. In one psychological framework, the group provides a normative influence on the individual. Depending on the particular situation, the group’s influence may be purely informational – providing information to an individual who is unsure of what to do. More interesting is the case in which the individual has definite opinions of what to do but conforms due to a normative influence of the group due to social reasons. In this model, normative influences are presumed to act through the aversiveness of being in a minority position (Hornsey et al 2003).

The amygdala activation in our experiment was perhaps the clearest marker of the emotional load associated with standing up for one’s belief. Another key component of social norm theory is that the information provided by the group must be salient to the individual. Besides the amygdala, the only other brain structure differentially activated by social independence was the right caudate nucleus . . . It is therefore not surprising that the caudate should be most active when the participant behaved independently of the group, for this is the condition of most salience: conflicting information and social isolation. . . .

Conclusions

To our knowledge, this is the first study of brain activity associated with social conformity and independence. Here, we present brain imaging findings that provide key biological evidence for the major psychological theory of conformity . . . The two main questions surrounding this inconsistency are whether conformity is culturally determined and whether conformity has changed over time as socio-political forces have shaped the relative acceptance of individualism or collectivism. . . The flip-side of conformity, independence, was found to be associated with subcortical activity changes indicative of emotional salience, a finding that lends support to social norm theory (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004).

Some people will be delighted to find that there is an actual physiological reason for what they have felt strongly, that is, the need to think and judge for oneself.  Others will be angry and offended that their identity, their “near mystical” self, is anything but a kind of soul that cannot be located in this reality and therefore empowers and authorizes them to over-rule everything else, even intimate others.  A strong feeling of this kind is a potent force in the face of persecution and even martyrdom.  Ask Louis Riel.  It is a kind of opposition to group forces that does not lend itself to compromise or even negotiation.  I suspect it is a conviction that is an advantage in harsh circumstances such as a challenging ecology like high prairie or seafaring.

As the power and number of the larger group increases, and particularly when that group is unified by “religious” convictions of what reality and necessity demand, then the culture becomes less and less tolerant of independence, redefined as deviance.  Now the adaptive style and brain operation is “go along to get along.”  Those who can manage that will do better.

Until the larger conditions become so difficult -- maybe because of war or famine or simply an economy that makes the lives of many into misery -- that the “religious” rules are questioned.  Then there will be either reform movements (return to the roots) or a Kuhnian reaching for a better system.  I interpret present times as responding to the multiple pressures of overpopulation, partly reinforced by crowding into mega-cities.

Back in the days of rat psych, someone rented a barn and built inside it an inescapable but observable “rat farm.”  Then they let overpopulation run rampant.  The result was very much like today’s cities and Middle East.  Another man, researching the inheritable temperament of dogs, put four different breeds into four enclosures and let the same inevitable process happen, breed by breed.  The terriers attacked each other, the cocker spaniels went nuts, and so on.  That is, brain differences came out.  The rats had just reacted like rats.

I’m suggesting that when the world is crowded, the tension between spiritual (individual) and religious (institutional) is so intensified that it’s hard not to be a rat.  Or a martyr.  The images become powerful.  Attractive suffering.  It can even be sexy.