psychology : mackenzian

May 5, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Radical acceptance

Radical acceptance just means that you acknowledge reality for what it is. If you accept the reality of the situation, you can stop dwelling on situations you have no control over (and even those you do) and move on with your life.

During a panel this week about the impact of religion on LGBTQIA people—religion as both trauma source and as a resource—I told a few personal stories and reflected back on a time when one of the only things that was helpful to me was the odd, old teaching “Resist not evil.”

RESIST! has become a contemporary rallying cry. But as I wrote in a recent post, hyper-vigilance is no way to live and rest is essential.

I’ve had to learn (and sometimes recognize I’m still learning) how to engage reality without resistance and not ceding my ability to imagine “otherwise.”

It’s not easy to cut arguments short, to not correct every misperception, and to leave others to be as fixed as they choose to be. And yet it’s a lot easier to do that than to spend energy in a reactive interpersonal cycle.

In a reflection on acceptance and contemporary politics, one social worker invites readers to practice “radical acceptance” about the challenges of their week.

Read it and see if there are any strategies you might apply to your own process.

April 24, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The consequences of belief

Last fall, I learned from Professor Jean Sheldon about why it’s important to be choosy about one’s ideals, mentors, models, and gods.

“The picture I have of God today,” Sheldon wrote, “is the photograph others will take of me tomorrow.”

People may well rise to the level of their gods. We only rise higher or stretch further when extremely motivated. It’s too uncomfortable to do otherwise and there’s every possible social justification not to!

In his book on prophecy, imagination, and hope, another Old Testament professor addresses the same point Sheldon did:

If we gather around a static god of order who only guards the interests of the ‘haves,’ oppression cannot be far behind. Conversely, if a God is disclosed who is free to come and go, free from and even against the regime, free to hear and even answer slave cries, free from all proper goodness as defined by the empire, then it will bear decisively upon sociology because the freedom of God will surface in the brickyards and manifest itself as justice and compassion.” —Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

Just as belief has practical consequences, so too claims of freedom should have material outcomes. M. Shawn Copeland once explained that we’re “freed for something,” not for freedom’s own ideological sake.

Our freedom isn’t to mimic the predictable patterns of the already is. There’s unpredictability, invention, and imagination in freedom. We’re free, instead, to live out an alternative: “a new social community in history,” and a new material reality.

Freedom means not leaving our ideals in their original packaging, never to be tested. It means being able to pull them out of the box, let the air and wind hit them, and get them as dirty as the construction materials they are.

It’s a vision that’s frightening only to empire and those of us whom empire has well-trained.

March 14, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The limits of belief

In a recent The Atlantic article on resilient beliefs, Julie Beck writes, “There are facts, and there are beliefs, and there are things you want so badly to believe that they become as facts to you… People often don’t engage with information as information but as a marker of identity.”

Humans have many superpowers. One of them is the power to transmute ideals into perceptions and perceptions into matter. What we wish were so becomes what we acknowledge in the world around us. What we acknowledge in the world then becomes part of the world itself as we stack routines, resources, and policies around our beliefs.

In Europe, for example, the belief that a nation or corporation is stronger when its residents or members hold similar ideologies and cultural practices leads to the perception that overtly distinct residents are Other to Us.

The perception of Otherness inspires laws that pressures those people to un-differentiate themselves to fit in, perhaps by removing religious clothing at work or in public spaces.

Restrictions on visible difference in the name of “neutrality” in turn squeeze minoritized people out of public space, and their marginalization ultimately reinforces their Othered status.

Very little in the way of facts is likely to change a French person convinced that Muslims don’t belong in France whether they were born in the country or joined it as immigrants.

Prejudices are resistant to direct rebuttal, Beck explains, and so too are beliefs. We have to be intentional about seeking out information that contradicts our beliefs or appears to put our survival or community ties at risk: absorbing contrary, belief-challenging information won’t happen by itself.

People see evidence that disagrees with them as weaker, because ultimately, they’re asking themselves fundamentally different questions when evaluating that evidence, depending on whether they want to believe what it suggests or not, according to psychologist Tom Gilovich. ‘For desired conclusions,’ he writes, ‘it is as if we ask ourselves “Can I believe this?”, but for unpalatable conclusions we ask, “Must I believe this?”‘ People come to some information seeking permission to believe, and to other information looking for escape routes.”

Read the rest on The Atlantic. The data on trust is particularly sobering.

January 29, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Normalcy is not a refuge

Ever since the new US president declared his candidacy, commentators have speculated about his mental health, armchair diagnosing him, and making claims about his psychological competence as if malignant politics would be comprehensible if only we had the right DSM label for it.

This tactic demeans millions of people who live with mental health conditions yet don’t compulsively promote bigotry or make policies that provoke nationwide protests. It also has roots in the implicit belief that the therapeutic sciences have the lens we should use to interpret and explain what’s most real and true about people and their behavior.

As Heather White explains in her recent book Reforming Sodom, this “therapeutic orthodoxy” has been used since the 18th Century to pathologize socially minoritized people, including those classified as non-heterosexual. Authors like Kelly Brown Douglas and M. Shawn Copeland show that the therapeutic model’s targets have also included African-American people and others colonized by European states.

So using medical categories to interpret political figures and social groups isn’t a new thing. It’s not especially helpful in our time either.

There’s no refuge in being crowned “normal,” not when “normal,” ordinary, unremarkable, middle-of-the-bell-curve people have always been the ones to help exceptional political figures carry out their work.

Technical communication professor Steven B. Katz caused a stir in the early 1990s by pointing out the ‘objective’ language and technically efficient processes that one German soldier used to improve his small part in the Third Reich’s extermination program.

The writer shows no concern that the purpose of his memo is the modification of vehicles not only to improve efficiency, but also to exterminate people… The whole society organized into a death machine for the efficient extirpation of millions, lauded by the Nazis as a hallmark of organization, elegance, efficiency, speed, all of which became ends in themselves for those planning and those executing the procedures.” —Steven B. Katz, The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust

“There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath,” Terry Pratchett once wrote, “that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.”

Maybe it would be easier for us if all queens and fuhrers and the pawns and foot soldiers who execute their strategies could be collapsed into an Other category, biomedical or psychological or theological or whatever.

If they could, we wouldn’t have to reckon with the role that unremarkable, efficient normalcy and people who perceive themselves as “normal” play in implementing politics of extraordinary cruelty—both historically and again today.

September 1, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Remembering with minimal projection

Mari Andrew illustration: "what it looks like now [squiqqly line]... what it will look like in hindsight [straight paved road]" — Illustration: Mari Andrew

Memory helps us to shape our sense of ourselves, and it’s a creative act, not an objective accounting.

Psychologists have established what they call “hindsight bias,” a mental quirk that encourages us to believe that today’s outcomes were once obvious and inevitable and that tomorrow’s changes are unlikely. We assume more constancy and less variance than we ought: our memories are both constructing and conservative.

In a very short talk, “The Psychology of Your Future Self,” Harvard professor Dan Gilbert explains this phenomenon. “We overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability,” he says. We retrospectively perceive the past as a road much straighter and smoother than any road we’re currently on, and we project onto our future selves all the consistency and coherence we imagine we already have.

As David McRaney might say, we’re not so smart.

When you desire meaning, when you want things to line up, you forget about stochasticity. You are lulled by the signal. You forget about noise… If you have a human brain, you do this all the time.” —David McRaney

So this is how the human storytelling brain works: we smooth out the wrinkles in our experiences for a tidier trip down memory lane, and we extrapolate from the present as much as we can (and more than’s appropriate).

If we can’t fix this bias, the least we can do is try to be more aware of it whenever we review where we are in life, what we’ve been able to create so far, and what might be possible tomorrow.

SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable or assignable, realistic, and time-bound) are one way to moderate the effect of this quirk when it comes to our future, but perhaps only a tall glass of self-compassion with a twist of skepticism can moderate it when it comes to our past.

Ask: What could just as easily be true? What other explanations fit the facts? Is there another story we could tell?

July 29, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Why information fails

A close-up photo of a wide grey rope tangled on the floor. — Photo credit: Tim Boote

Last month, the London Guardian reported that the mantra of the Brexit campaigners was “Facts don’t work… You have got to connect with people emotionally.”

MSNBC’s Maddow Show contributors also fretted about this political information approach spreading to Europe from the United States. But emotion-heavy, data-light appeals have long been part of British and continental European politics: propaganda isn’t an American invention!

Is this really what we’re exporting? Assurances that ‘facts don’t work,’ ‘the Trump success’ is a model worthy of emulation, and subject-matter experts are better left ignored?'” —Steven Benen

I invested eight years in learning the arts and science of informing people. Technical communication is about effective information; rhetoric is about effective persuasion. And while the two fields are so related I could take coursework in the same program and from the same cohort of instructors, they are distinct.

We learn from both fields to handle information with respect and not to use information structures to mislead, obscure, or harm. There’s something deeply unsettling about graduating out of such a program and into a public sphere that does not seem to value “facts.”

But there are psychological reasons why people prefer pathos (emotional appeals) and ethos (credibility markers) to logos (logical argument, data, and fact), and it’s probably not going to change.

On the blog You Are Not So Smart, David McRaney describes several ways our intuitions and habits of thought betray us. The Backfire Effect is one such betrayal based on the fact that we usually treat our beliefs like prized property and guard them more carefully than we do our own homes.

Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do it instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens them instead. Over time, the backfire effect helps make you less skeptical of those things which allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.—David McRaney

This is why a site like the Washington Post has ended its debunking column: readers absorbed only initial misinformation. Clarifying myths or correcting partial truths only seemed to entrench people’s prior commitment to stories and claims later proven wrong. Facts weren’t working, and misinformation sticks.

Psychologist and writer M. Scott Peck wrote about this in his own way decades ago. In The Road Less Traveled, Peck explains how we set up homeland security not only around single beliefs but also around our larger belief systems:

Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost. While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.”
M. Scott Peck

Peck argues that we have to be “dedicated to reality” in order to stay healthy, to make sound decisions, and to make progress that benefits us and others. How we relate to facts makes all the difference: we can be healthy when we’re continuously relating. Establishing a once-for-all-time relation as if the world is a closed, fixed system doesn’t work. And yet we demonstrate the backfire effect as we resist new facts and undermine the reform that information often requires of us.

People working on issues like climate change are taking this information on board, and rather than simply offering people “the facts” are sharing stories that allow members of the public to engage emotionally, leading with the issues with their values and priorities, not just logically with charts and graphs. LGBTQ organizers are doing likewise.

Why did Britain’s Remain campaign not do that?

How can you engage more than the raw facts when you have opportunities to inform and persuade others in your own career?