Adam Omary: Welcome to the Human Progress Podcast. I’m Adam Omary, a psychologist and a new research fellow at Human Progress. I’m pleased to be joined today by Dr. Chris Ferguson, professor of psychology at Stetson University, and author of several books, including Catastrophe! How Psychology Explains Why Good People Make Bad Situations Worse, which we’ll be talking about today. Chris, welcome to the Human Progress Podcast.
Christopher Ferguson: Hey, thanks for having me on today. I really appreciate it.
Adam Omary: Before we talk about your book, Catastrophe, I’d love to talk about your recent excellent article on what people have called the “Loneliness Epidemic.” Americans are increasingly alone, but are they really lonely?
Christopher Ferguson: Yeah, sure. Happy to talk about it. Yeah, so it was prompted by this idea that has been being batted around for maybe about a decade or so at this point, maybe even a little bit longer. And it was really reinforced by the US Surgeon General about two years ago when they released this advisory, I think they call them advisories saying essentially there’s this, basically, they said there’s this loneliness epidemic, and we’re like, lonelier than ever, and this is like a crisis and the kind of typical stuff and that get picked up a lot by news media. And of course now you see like this even in memes and cartoons and stuff, people are like particularly for men, I think it seems to be focusing on right now, but this idea that people are like lonelier than ever.
Christopher Ferguson: We’re all living in like horrible isolation and miserable and that sort of stuff. So I was really kind of curious. It wasn’t an area I’ve done a lot of research in other than maybe as kind of a corollary to some, like the social media research that I do, but. I was really kind of curious as I kind of go in and see what the evidence was in support of, or maybe not in support of this particular idea. And one of the things I noticed is like in a lot of this conversation, people would keep switching what they were talking about. So they say, we have a loneliness epidemic, and look over here, there’s evidence that we’re spending less time with other people. And like, those aren’t exactly the same thing. Right? You know what and so that kind of struck me as like there’s a disparate conversation that’s being had here. And so the issue seems to be that indeed we’re spending a modestly smaller amount of time with other individuals.
Christopher Ferguson: And in one of the studies, the Supreme Court had highlighted it worked out to be about a 1.7% decrease over about 20 years. And that’s sort of excluding 2020, which was the COVID year, tat was a weird year, but sort of like without that year in it, there was this kind of like… There was a decline, but it’s about like 1.7%. That seems to be robust, but of course very modest. So it doesn’t seem to be like a huge difference from 20 years ago, but there’s a little bit of a difference. But on the other hand, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad, because people sometimes are pretty annoying. You know what I mean? So it’s not like every moment you spend with someone is great. So sometimes maybe spending less time around other people could be good if other people are sort of annoying. So we don’t really know that, like if it’s going up, is going down that it’s a bad thing. And kind of the classic example is people are working remotely more, and I’m a good example of this, since COVID, I really only go in most weeks, twice a week to teach my classes, and then I work from home on research during the rest of the week. And I love it because I don’t want to be around the other people.
[laughter]
Christopher Ferguson: You know what I mean? I don’t want more faculty meetings. I mean I’d be around people more, but I wouldn’t be enjoying myself. So remote work seems to be something a lot of people want if they happen to be in a profession where it’s possible to do that. And the actual evidence that we’re lonelier over time is largely just not there. We just don’t see that robust evidence to suggest we actually feel worse because of this modest change in the time we spend with others. And so I think that’s part of what the Surgeon General maybe got wrong or maybe made a mistake, is sort of attributing a modest decline in one area of spending time with others too.
Christopher Ferguson: This being a mental health crisis that we need to be worried about. And interesting even when I went out, I was kind of in journalism mode, not like researcher mode to some extent. I interviewed some of the people that… I tried to reach out to the former surgeon general, Dr. Murphy, who had led the effort. He didn’t write it, but he led the effort. And we reached out to the person who did write it, and then the current surgeon general’s office the DHHS, none of whom really responded in any meaningful way. But of the researchers they cited… Some people they cited in the advisory. And most of them kind of said the same thing that I’ve been saying. It’s like, “No, no, no, my research isn’t about loneliness, it’s about time spent alone.” Those are very different things. They would say like, there’s evidence that we’re spending less time with other people, but that doesn’t mean that people are lonelier necessarily. So there seems to have been a mangling of the actual data in the way that this has been broadcast in news media.
Adam Omary: It’s an interesting and refreshing perspective to consider how much of that time alone is voluntary. And an example that came to mind for me is choosing to have roommates or not, especially with rising housing prices, a lot of people talk about living alone as a luxury. So it is a choice. Oftentimes roommates, they allow you to spend more time with people, but that’s considered the burden, and given enough money and free choice, people choose to live alone.
Christopher Ferguson: Yeah. Well, roommates are annoying. When I was younger, I had some series of roommates, some of who were lovely, and some of whom were horrible. And most were somewhere in between that. And so I’ve been lucky that now I have two roommates, those being my wife and my son, but they’re both lovely people, so I enjoy living with them. And of course, we have a bigger property than some small apartment that we’re crammed into. So we can get out of each other’s way a little easier too, if we’re so inclined to do that. But yeah, most of us are not like, super excited to live with roommates. And oftentimes that close proximity can cause problems. I mean, there’s also this issue too that, is like in these measures of time spent alone, a lot of that seems to revolve around physical proximity in other words, we’re like literally in the room with someone talking to them, playing chess or whatever the heck we want to do, playing badminton, I don’t know, whatever. Playing soccer or something like that. But what about… So like, I always out myself and I say I’m a pretty big geek essentially. And so I play Dungeons & Dragons, and a lot of the time I’m playing Dungeons & Dragons online with friends that I have around the country, sometimes around the world. Does that count? And I’m hanging out with friends, we’re talking, we’re laughing, we’re having a good time, but we’re thousands of miles away from each other.
Christopher Ferguson: Does that count as time spent with people, or is that still time spent alone? And I think there’s a lot of like ambiguity in some of the data too, about whether some social activities, particularly through digital media count as time spent with others, or are they this kind of like distracting influence that’s ruined this like pre-digital 1970s utopia that supposedly existed that we are ideally should return to, anyway. So I think that’s kind of what the narrative is, is like that the digital stuff doesn’t count. I’m not sure that there’s any evidence that suggests that it shouldn’t count.
Adam Omary: Yeah. You see a lot of back and forth as to whether you should look at digital connection with glass half full or glass half empty. One example is you and I now have met online and are talking in real time for many states away, so that feels pretty socially fulfilling. I’ve done, at this point, well over 100 podcasts like these and met over 100 people that I’ve not met physically. So I feel in some ways more socially connected than I might have otherwise, without the technology. On the other hand, and I guess this is more the conservative doomsday narrative about online technology. It’s probably true that if none of these avenues were afforded to me, I would go out of my way to meet more people in person. So it’s like a problem of free choice given that you could choose to meet your social needs online or in person. And online is often more convenient, people choose to do that. Is that a problem or not?
Christopher Ferguson: Yeah. And I think the reality is there’s a lot of nuances in this, right? You can think on one hand, there are probably some people who really do benefit from like social media and smartphones and all that kind of stuff, because they struggle to do well meeting people in real life. So you may think of like high functioning autistic individuals, people with social phobia, regular old garden variety introverts and all this kind of stuff, who actually might look at the digital revolution as this kind of, really positive influence. They’re able to meet more people, they’re able to meet more people with their very idiosyncratic interests. I meet more Dungeons & Dragons players pretty easily through online means, and it would be possible for me to do so in person.
Christopher Ferguson: I have a game I play in person too, so I do it both ways. But I think that is kind of the issue. Yeah, you might say that there are… There certainly are some people that don’t do social media well. They get into stupid arguments it’s like that joke, you sometimes see the cartoon of “I can’t go to sleep right now ’cause someone’s wrong on the internet,” and they’re just like pounding away the keyboards and this sort of thing. And most people are probably somewhere in between where it’s just neutral. It’s a accent point or frosting on the cake or whatever kind of cliche we want to use for it. But they would’ve been fine without it they’re fine with it, it’s not really hurting or helping their lives one way or another. But it is sort of interesting how like the narratives do do change.
Christopher Ferguson: I mean, during COVID, again, there was all the “social media’s wonderful it’s keeping kids from like, infecting their grandparents, and it’s wonderful, it’s keeping people together.” And then like five years later we’re like, ” we hate it. It is awful. It’s the end of civilization. Like, literally Skynet is going to take over the planet.” And of course, the reality’s probably not extreme in either of those directions. But yeah, what we actually see is that for most individuals there’ve been a few research studies that looked at this, is that actually time spent on smartphones and time spent on social media does not actually have much impact on real life relationships.
Christopher Ferguson: That in fact, usually where you see like the time sink, obviously the time has to go somewhere, right? So time spent on social media and time spent on smartphones mostly draws teens and young adults away from television. So television seems to be the big casualty of the social media age, which is interesting. Now, of course 30, 40, 50 years ago, people worried about television being the thing that was drawing people away from real life relationships and stuff. So there is this kind of repetitive pattern that we see. But yeah, finally we found something to get the kids off, off of television, and it’s social media and smartphone. But now people want everyone to go back to watch TV, I guess or something.
Adam Omary: Do you know Chris any historical evidence as to whether the same was said about telephones when they first became popularized? Kids are…
Christopher Ferguson: Yes.
Adam Omary: Spending hours indoors talking on the phone, they’re not connecting in person, their brains are rotting?
Christopher Ferguson: Basically yes, absolutely. So the real phone, the regular old phone, the landline also was a subject of very similar panic. And this was 100 plus years ago, of course. And it wasn’t just like the kids, but it was women, right? Because the status of women in society was very different in the early 20th century than it is in the early 21st, right? So there was a sense of like, women are going to neglect their household duties, they’re going to find lovers via the phone this kind of stuff. Even the telegraph, people worried about the telegraph of all things, kind of similar respects. I just recently came across an article that was from or it was talking about stuff that was going on about 200 years ago. At the beginning of the 19th century, people were worried about the kaleidoscope. Now you probably don’t even have one at this point, right? But that was that thing you would look into, and you would just massage it, and they would have all the pretty colors and this kind of stuff. And people were worried 200 years ago that kids and dumb young people essentially would spend hours and hours looking into kaleidoscopes, and that would ruin their lives, and just. I don’t think we had the same kind of pseudoscience neuro language we do today, but it’s the same basic idea that this was going to be this addictive thing that was going to ruin kids. So it just, it is a cycle that goes on and, and on and on and on without anybody worrying too much about evidence and stuff.
Adam Omary: A very optimistic picture is emerging then that to some degree, this is a perennial problem. People, especially, maybe older generations, just react negatively and catastrophize new technology. But every generation will adapt to the new technology that where social beings, we have a need to belong, will adapt around it, and wherever possible even use the technology to fulfill our social needs and find new forms of connection like online Dungeons & Dragons. And to the degree we’re spending more time alone, it might be just a result of free choice and convenience, and not necessarily a problem. But I do want to steelman, the loneliness epidemic. I imagine that this explains a lot of the issue, but at the same time, we are seeing real trends of worsening mental health. And it seems plausible that, especially in young people social media could be creating newer maladaptive patterns where you could imagine new technology comes along for adults, they’ve already learned how to integrate into the social world, they can balance that very well with in-person interactions. Whereas if someone is raised where online interaction becomes the default, perhaps you lack the opportunity to even build the skills that would allow you to say, delay gratification and find healthy balance between screens and in-person life. Do you worry about that?
Christopher Ferguson: Nope. [laughter] no. We actually have no evidence to support that. I appreciate you steel man, and it was a very good, very eloquent version of the story. Much more eloquent than some people put it. So we have basically different streams of evidence that contradict that. First the, I won’t say it’s the only country, but certainly what you could say is like, most of the focus is on the United States. What I mean by that is we don’t see this pattern in mental health in other countries. So most other countries that have adopted similar technology smartphones to social media, we do not see a pattern of youth suicides or youth mental health declining, so it seems to be something very specific that was happening in the United States.
Christopher Ferguson: And for various reasons, I think the best number to track in terms of trends is suicide, because a body is a body and that kind of stuff, self-report tends to be kind of rubbish. And there are lots of like, reporting issues with like, ER, self injuries and that kind of stuff. So a lot of data there basically says the best trend to follow is suicide. And in most European countries, or like Japan, Australia, New Zealand, for instance, we don’t see any evidence that there was a mental health crisis among anybody, certainly not in youth. So we did see this pattern in the United States where there was an increase in youth suicide in the 2010s. It has now begun to reverse, so a lot of people don’t know that.
Christopher Ferguson: But the CDC has pointed out that actually youth mental health is improving in the last three-ish years at this point since 2020, essentially, since COVID that we’re seeing a… Hopefully that will continue, we don’t know. Maybe it will reverse again, who knows. But so far we’re seeing a much improved trend for youth in the United States. Actually the increase in suicide was much worse for middle aged adults than it was for teens. So it happens to be that I’m in actually one of the most suicide prone demographic categories. And by the way, this is not a cry for help, I’m doing fine, I’m happy and that kind of stuff. But compared to a teenage girl, which everybody’s worried about teenage girls, and that’s fine, we should be worried about teenage girls.
Christopher Ferguson: But a middle aged white man specifically the only other group, by the way that has a higher suicide rate than middle aged white men is young Native American men, soo they have a higher suicide rate. So like mid 20s to early 30s native American men have a higher suicide rate. Otherwise one of the highest suicide races, white males specifically at 45 to 55 essentially. So a man in my demographic category has roughly a three to five times elevated suicide risk compared to a teenage girl. Teenage girls largely do not kill themselves very often, middle aged men do, and if you actually watch the pattern. So that kind of… That’s a direct contrast to what you’re saying about, well, maybe the middle aged adults are doing fine.
Christopher Ferguson: No, they’re not, they’re doing terrible. And it seems to be a generational thing. It seems to be Gen X, my generation in particular was like one of the worst generations on record, that kind of like late ’80s early ’90s group of individuals. And if you actually follow the US trend line in teen suicide, it tracks almost perfectly with the suicide trend line for middle aged adults. So what we tend to find and again, this is based on a lot of CDC data, is that the teens who at most risk for suicide, or those that have had parents who’ve committed suicide, or parents who have opioid, substance abuse issues or have been incarcerated and things like that. So it seems to be that the problems we’ve experienced with teens in the United States have been downstream are problems that their parents have been experiencing specifically on the issue of mental health.
Christopher Ferguson: And like I said, now that’s reversing, at least for the teenagers, which is good news. And irrespective of tech debates I hope that that continues, because that’s obviously wonderful news. But we don’t know, we’ll see if the trend continues to reverses in future years. But what’s interesting is that here we talk a lot about like mental health, right? And there’s this causal attribution, like there was this increase in teen suicide in the 2010s. And a lot of people have in classic ecological fallacy manner attributed that to smartphones and social media, at the same time most other teen behaviors got better. So, bullying went down, violent crime went down, substance abuse went down, smoking went down, drinking went down, school dropouts went down, teen pregnancy went down.
Christopher Ferguson: And nobody’s sitting around thinking, oh, thank God for smartphones and social media making all these wonderful things happen for teenagers. Right? So that’s this negativity bias that’s very normal for humans, right? We focus in on the negative news and we cherry pick that and only make this causal attribution for the trend line that is negative, and we don’t make any causal attributions for all the positive trend lines that are happening for the same group of individuals. Now, of course, this is all correlational data. We shouldn’t make causal attributions to any of it, right? You know what I mean? But that’s the ecological fallacy sort of aspect of these things. But yeah, no, we don’t… We have a lot of study, we have hundreds of studies at this point that look at social media, time spent on social media and mental health.
Christopher Ferguson: Some of those are with teens, some of those are with young adults, and a lot of them with college students, of course. And generally across these studies, we do not find that time spent on social media or smartphones is predictive of negative mental health outcomes, nor do we find that reducing social media time improves mental health in experimental studies. So there just isn’t any evidence, really. Or at least if you like, do meta-analysis, you can combine the individual studies together, the combination of studies together does not support that technology related to loneliness or depression, anxiety, self-esteem basically any mental health measure you look at, there’s just nothing there.
Adam Omary: My research has shown similar findings that we’re seeing decreases in suicide across most Western countries with the US as an outlier. It’s good to know in the most recent data that that trend is starting to reverse though that, I haven’t looked into the last couple years, and similarly that in Europe the trend is reversed, so it’s not necessarily a problem of progress or abundance, per se, it could be something unique about the culture or the polarization in the US. Have you thought about what might be driving that? What makes the US an outlier for suicide?
Christopher Ferguson: Yeah. [laughter] Probably a few different things. And of course, suicide’s never down to one thing, right? It’s a complicated phenomenon. And part of it’s simply that the United States has a sine wave when it comes to suicide and lots of other… In other words, it goes up, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down. And actually, ironically, we have all these people that now that are saying we should go back to the ’70s and ’80s which some people think was this utopia, which I grew up in, by the way. So I know exactly what it was like to be a child at that time period, there was no utopia. And actually like I said, that was actually the worst generation of teens on record.
Christopher Ferguson: They had the highest suicide, teen pregnancy, violent crimes, substance abuse, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So that this Generation X maybe it’s not fair to… I actually don’t like generation talk in general, so it’s probably not fair to say it’s Gen X or whatever, so just using as kind of shorthand for now, to be fair. So actually we had a peak of suicide in the late ’80s and early ’90s that was as high as the peak around 2017, 2018 in the United States. And there was no smartphones or social media at the time. So we kind of see this like just sine wave thing, and nobody’s ever really known exactly why the US has this kind of like sine wave of suicide. If you look at actual trends, though, and again, these are all correlational, so I do have a paper that looks at various societal trends and how they track with teen suicide.
Christopher Ferguson: It doesn’t matter if you look at boys or girls, you get the same basic kind of patterns. Generally what you see is that changes in digital… Or changes in media use. We kind of talked about already how people are shifting from television into social media and smartphones, that doesn’t seem to matter, that doesn’t seem to track. In fact, you end up with kind of like a negative correlational… Like small negative correlation that if anything, that change is correlated negatively to teen suicide. But those are fairly small correlations, so I don’t make much of them. What you do see is again, that teen suicide tracks, parents suicide. It lags. Even if you kind of like, think of like a time series analysis where you’re kind of like, the parents are committing suicide now, and then teens are committing suicide like one year later kind of thing.
Christopher Ferguson: So even at these time, lags, you see that. Like earlier parental suicide tends to predict later teen suicide. Other things that you tend to find are like political polarization, so as political polarization has gotten worse in the… There’s sprinkles in here for both sides by the way, I’ll get through. And none of these, am I making a political statement, by the way. So political instability or political polarization seems to be a correlate. Income inequality, as income inequality worsens, you tend to find teen suicide worsens. Some change… Now, this is the one the conservatives are going to, like, they’re going to hate everything I just said about everything else, but they’re going to like this one. So some changes in education that occurred in the 2010s.
Christopher Ferguson: And what that means is an increased focus on, for lack of a better word, I’m going to use the word woke ’cause nobody’s ever come up with a better word. I understand it’s a controversial word, but the sort of like the US is racist and sexist and oppressive and all that kind of narrative that seems to correlate with an increase in teen suicides. So you get these kinds of like, different disparate factors. Now, they’re probably all of themselves kind of related to each other so political polarization is probably related to different educational narratives and income inequality, all that kind of other stuff. But my best guess based on this correlational data, and these correlations are pretty strong, we’re talking like 0.7 correlations, by the way even in the sort of time lag time series analyses.
Christopher Ferguson: So there are strong correlations, much stronger than anything you see for like, social media, whatever. My best guess is not of course, that like teens are watching the news and picking up on like political polarization so much, but more that these are all sort representing like angst or anxieties in society that are affecting the parents, and that trickles down. I think there’s a large trickle down effect that what’s happening to adults. And that’s probably primarily the parents, but also maybe their teachers. If your teacher is telling you the US sucks and it’s racist and sexist, and you have no chance of succeeding because of all the oppression and capitalism, blah, blah, blah, blah, then it’s kind of depressing. And if your parent also has an a fentanyl addiction or something of that sort, then you’re getting hit from both sides.
Christopher Ferguson: And so you really have no chance as a teenager. So I think the big mistake we made in this whole narrative about social media and smartphones, the anxious generation, whatever you want to talk about it, is that the real anxious generation is parents. And we divorced the numbers in terms o, we looked at kids by themselves and didn’t look at their parents and how badly their parents actually are doing right now. And that caused us, it’s like the blind men in the elephant parable. If you only touch one part, then you don’t see the larger picture, and I think that’s exactly what happened, that we should have looked at the larger picture and seen that actually the parents generation is doing far worse than the teenagers. And to the extent that teenagers are struggling, it’s probably ’cause their parents, and to a lesser extent, teachers and everybody else are freaking out. So we should have addressed this as a middle-aged adult issue rather than a teen issue.
Adam Omary: I agree with you, Chris, that suicide and self-harm and other objective measures tend to be more reliable than self-report, where the diagnostic criteria for how depressed do you have to be for it to count as clinically significant depression. Now, arguably, we’re seeing a crisis of overdiagnosis. And it’s an interesting mystery to reflect on in countries where suicide rates are going down, we still do see at least a diagnoses of internalizing symptoms, depression and anxiety go up. And I think that’s related to all these cultural changes you’re talking about. It sounds like you disagree with Jonathan Haidt’s causal claim that social media is behind this, but he’s also speculated about just these cultural changes like helicopter parenting, not necessarily even intentionally, but simply as a demographic byproduct of the fact that people are having fewer children, so you have the same amount of attention and resources, maybe because people are having children later as well.
Adam Omary: They have more resources, they’re devoting more attention to their children compared to when older generations might have been growing up with their kids to some degree, and that could foster a sense of independence and resilience in children. So all of those… Well, first, I’m interested in whether you believe that that could be driving a version of this mental health crisis. Again, even if mental health objectively isn’t worsening, if we’re more sensitive to it for those reasons. And secondly, whether there’s a risk of self-fulfilling prophecy. I think this ties into your point about education where regardless of how levels of say, oppression have changed across generations, it could give kids more of a external locus of control to have so much focus on those types of negative systemic factors. And that could undermine otherwise the internal locus of control that would foster resilience and positive mental health and positive outcomes.
Christopher Ferguson: Yeah, yeah. There’s a lot there. And I think there’s a lot of great questions that are… Hopefully I remember to touch upon them. So one of the things you do find is like there are these, like, global studies that use standardized DSM criteria, right? Not self-diagnosis, but actually look at… And not, and not even clinician diagnosis, but look at like these kind of like structured interviews and this kind of stuff based on DSM symptoms. And there’s a compound in there, and I’m going to… You might already guess what it is, but we’ll talk about the compound in there in a second. But the kind of of the cool news there is if you look like global, like literally globally, like concluding, like everywhere, not just the developed world that largely teen anxiety and depression is stayed pretty stable. We don’t see, again, globally any increase in sort of like DSM objective criteria diagnostic stuff.
Christopher Ferguson: Now you do see some regional differences, however, and I think that’s what you were speaking to is in the more like Anglophone world you definitely do see more diagnoses being made than you do in the global south/third world, whatever descriptive you want to use for that. So there again, I think there’s a lot of focus in like the US, UK, Australia, Canada and people are kind of neglecting like two thirds of the world in these narrative which maybe is not super, super great. But yeah. So the confound, of course, also in a lot of this, is that the DSM changed all their diagnostic criteria.
Christopher Ferguson: Like somewhere, was it… 2013, I think was the DSM-V5 if I remember correctly. So there’s that confound that’s thrown in there. And for most of the criteria as the DSMs want to do from one generation to the next is they made it easier to get diagnosed with a lot of these things, right? So there’s that kind of like confound in a lot of this. And I think even colloquially, the way we use language has changed around mental health. First there’s less stigma around it, which is great, which means people feel freer to talk about it and maybe more willing to speak about depression and anxiety. On the other hand, I think maybe also some of that has gone too far.
Christopher Ferguson: So some of that is almost like people put it in their Twitter bio kind of stuff. So it might have gone beyond de-stigmatization into full blown incentivization sort of thing where people who have minor issues are now talking about their trauma even though they’ve never been to war or been raped or had a horrible thing happen to them, this kind of thing. But their dad didn’t take them to the zoo when they were four and now they’re traumatized, PTSD or whatever. So I think there’s probably a little bit element that we’re redefining what some things are that are maybe we would’ve thought of as normal, it is just life, sometimes you feel sad or anxious, and now it’s like a, we think we need to go to the therapist or the psychiatrist or whatever.
Christopher Ferguson: So there’s that. As far as the helicopter parenting or the sort of coddling or whatever, I actually… I had largely bought that for a while and I thought that the arguments were compelling that Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff had made about that. I’ve become more skeptical over time. And I think what people are reacting to at a lot of that is, particularly at university. So obviously you and I both work at universities, and so we’ve experienced some of this firsthand that. Like 15 years ago, if someone broke down and had a hysterical fit, we might have like put our arms around them and scored them someplace where they could relax or something like that, but they wouldn’t have won the argument.
Christopher Ferguson: Like, that would not have been a point of evidence. But it became a point of evidence somewhere in here, all of a sudden, like in the mid 2010s at universities, the person who is the most upset would win the argument kind of a thing, or who could speak to their oppression or whatever else. Suddenly like, as an Irish American, I am Irish American, somehow that became like the talking point that my opinion matters more because of my demographics rather than the actual evidence I could bring to bear. So I think some people were annoyed by that, and I think rightly so. And so I think they had the sense of like, universities are coddling some of the students who maybe need mental health care and shouldn’t dictate policy at the university.
Christopher Ferguson: And I think a lot of those critiques were very, very fair. When you actually look at the evidence though on helicopter parenting. So I think that’s a little bit of a different issue from the sense of helicopter parenting. You tend to find relatively small effect sizes with negative outcomes. They are there. There are these small correlations in meta-analyses between the sort of helicopter parenting, but they’re much smaller than people would realize. So they’re there, but they’re like, again, you probably know stats, correlation is like 0.1 or something like that. So it is really explaining about 1% of the variants in like mental health outcomes in youth. They are mostly in a negative direction but they’re very small.
Christopher Ferguson: So I thin the issue of the helicopter parenting has been somewhat exaggerated. I’m not encouraging it, by the way, nobody should take this as support on my head, I’m just trying to sort of set the data. I find it annoying personally, but I also think it’s important to speak to the data where kids have problems. So if we’re looking at who are the kids who are suicidal again, the CDC has tons of data on this at this point. Is the kids who are abused or who again, we’ve been talking about whose parents are in prison or who died because they overdosed on heroin, those are the kids that have the biggest problems. So it’s adverse child events tend to have a much bigger explanatory power.
Christopher Ferguson: They explain something like 25% of the variance in some cases in negative youth outcome. So, yeah. I think that the coddling stuff is annoying, I don’t think it was good college policy. I think that caused a lot of problems for universities around free speech issues and things like that. Absolutely. I am against it in a principle, I don’t think it’s a great parenting strategy, but it’s not the biggest problem kids are having. The biggest problem is dysfunctional families that are abusive or falling apart, or dad’s not in the picture, that kind of thing is really a big issue. But I also do think that the K through 12 schools, which have been struggling as long as I’ve been alive have always tried to have these fixes, right?
Christopher Ferguson: There’s always like a new policy they’re trying to put in place. Now it’s the cell phone bands. But before that it was the social emotional learning kind of stuff, were we’re all going to get around and sit in a circle and talk about our feelings today, and it turns out that doesn’t work. So again, the effect sizes for SEL tend to be pretty small in terms of like, actual improvements in grades or mental health for students. I think this. And some of the schools did go down this road of… And this has been pretty well documented, like Eric Kaufman’s documented this. I have a study that looked at like these kind of oppressive lessons in schools and this sort of thing. We do see that there was this sort of expansion of, not every teacher by any means but certainly more kids were hearing all these like oppressive stories about how bad the US was in a very one-sided direction. And of course, we should learn about negative history.
Christopher Ferguson: We should learn about segregation as slavery, it shouldn’t be whitewashed either, for lack of a better way of putting it. But clearly things had gotten unbalanced and it was an overcorrection we might say for past ignorances. And that was probably not great. So again, by itself, telling kids the US is an impressive hellhole probably isn’t going to cause them to be suicidal, but if you have kids that are not doing well in home either, and then the school is telling them either that you’re an oppressor if you’re white or you have no chance of succeeding, if you’re not white then that’s probably not helpful for the kids that are already not getting a lot of positivity at home. I think there’s… A lot of mistakes were made in the 2010s, maybe by both sides of the political spectrum as people worried somewhat obsessively maybe about kids.
Adam Omary: I’ve been fascinated lately around the role of narrative in mental health and sense of meaning, because there’s this interesting paradox where you could have stories or interpretations that are objectively false, but still have real causal outcomes, including something like having such a pessimistic take on your own history or your own country or your own identity. The premises of that argument might be false, but adopting false premises could still lead to harmful psychological effects. And maybe this is just me having swallowed the pill to some degree, but I still think especially in children, do you think that especially in children, even just as a result of not having fully developed brains, they might be more susceptible to the same pessimistic narratives?
Christopher Ferguson: Yeah. Young kids are going to believe what the authorities tell them, right? It’s kind of how young kids brains… As young kids go through reality testing development, they first start to rely on authority figures, they start with parents and they shift to teachers and this kind of stuff. So largely the younger kids. When they hit like puberty is when they start believing that adults are wrong. So having raised a child into young adulthood, I’m familiar with all the stages of when I was cool and when I wasn’t cool, and then when I was cool again sort of thing. But yeah. First off lessons need to be developmentally appropriate. So I think that on the progressive side, maybe where things went wrong both in terms of like race and then also in terms of like gender issues is like a lot of the messages were just not developmentally appropriate.
Christopher Ferguson: You don’t want to take five-year-olds and tell them their country’s a hellhole or that maybe they’re a boy actually when they’re a girl, that kind of stuff that’s probably a discussion for later. So I think some parents were rightfully upset that some… Yeah, I think the intention was good nonetheless, but a lot of the messages were just developmentally inappropriate. And some of them, again, you want to tell kids the truth. And I think a lot of, like the history wars on both sides are not about telling kids the truth, but are trying to sell them a story that’s politically useful for one side of the political aisle or the other. So you might rightly criticize past conservative teaching as being whitewashing of America sins around slavery, and segregation and brutality towards native Americans and all that kind of stuff.
Christopher Ferguson: And I think is absolutely a very fair criticism of like teaching in the 1960s, right? That’s long gone, that kind of teaching no longer… I won’t say… I’m sure it exists sporadically in places, but it’s not the norm anymore in American teaching. And again, I think there was this overcorrection on the other hand of portraying the United States or Europeans as unique sinners that like slavery was invented by Spaniards and native Americans until the Europeans arrived, sat around campfires, like children holding hands and singing Kumbaya, and they loved women in nature and never did anything wrong, when the reality is that Indians kept slaves engaged in genocidal warfare, mistreated women, wiped out most of the big mammals that existed in North America when they arrived so on and so forth.
Christopher Ferguson: Mass extinction in North America when… They’re humans just like everybody else. They’re neither better or worse than other humans anywhere on the planet. Were all basically the same in many ways, deeply flawed. So I think that was kind of like the problem, and how like, just like teaching became a war between like conservatives and progressives, neither of whom were interested in “the truth” most of whom just wanted to sell a particular narrative. But I think maybe the weakness for the progressive side is that they ended up kind of selling a very negative message, at least the conservative one is, if it’s not true at least it was positive, you know what I mean?
Christopher Ferguson: And there’s probably something beneficial about telling people a fairy story. I’m not advocating this again, to be very clear, but that probably results in better outcomes. And telling them that they themselves are staying forever by the sins of their ancestors and their country is a capitalist nightmare that’s taking advantage of the rest of the innocent world where everybody just wants to sing songs and bang on drums and all these other stereotypes of indigenous people and that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think you can tell kids the truth in a way, look sometimes history sucks and absolutely the US did a lot of things wrong. Slavery sucked, segregation sucked, in many ways we treated the Native Americans horribly. But yeah, on the other hand, native Americans also had slaves and they engaged in genocidal warfare against each other before we ever arrived and they would take women as war wives and they would rape them and cut off their noses and ears and all kinds of…
Christopher Ferguson: Basically you can talk about the positive stuff of both societies too, the great art and music and culture, all this other kinds of stuff. You don’t have to like slam either side. But I think if you tell kids the truth developmentally appropriately and bring them to the point of like saying like, look, we’re all humans in the end, and all societies have great features to them, all societies have negative features to them. And that’s kind of the way forward, I think they’ll be fine. But unfortunately, I think it’s just like parents are just intent to… And teachers are intent on screaming at each other because nobody wants to tell the truth, the truth is complicated. [laughter]
Adam Omary: The truth is complicated. Speaking of developmentally appropriate narratives, it’s interesting how in children’s stories, how dramatically oversimplified it is. There’s a good guy and a bad guy, and they even wear capes. And the bad guy is all dressed in black and gloomy, and that the hero is brightly dressed, and everyone’s cheering. And then gradually as children’s stories develops into young adult fiction and then into great literature, you see all of the nuance come into play, you see tormented heroes and really relatable villains. And you also talk about this in your book Catastrophe, sometimes you see the reversion of that nuance, especially in political dialogues where there seems to be a temptation to simplify things back into this binary all good versus all bad narrative. And as you mentioned, we’re all human, all of the good and the bad exists within either group or either individual. And that’s really the complex nuance, but it’s cognitively demanding to digest all of that nuance.
Christopher Ferguson: Yeah. It absolutely is. And of course there’s lots of research and a variety of cognitive biases, right? We already talk about negativity bias. So a lot of this comes down to another bias, that’s something that’s called my side bias. And we can kind of say, like, some people argue these are all really one big bias, right? It’s all really basically confirmation bias. But, my side bias is the sense that we generally have, and probably evolved to a large extent, tend to be more forgiving of individuals that we see as part of our social group and less forgiving of individuals we see as part of another social group. And of course, you see this in politics all the time. Like cancel culture, right? I like to think of myself as a pretty rigorous free speech advocate. I think cancel culture or whatever we want to call that thing is pretty bad. I believe in pretty broad free speech rights, nothing’s absolute, of course. So back around 2020, and really maybe a little bit earlier, and certainly for a few years afterward, we saw a lot of this like progressive cancel culture. If you said the wrong thing, in fact, my dissertation chair actually was a victim of the sort of cancel culture.
Christopher Ferguson: Like, after George Floyd was murdered, he went on Twitter and said something that was off message. Probably wouldn’t be even terribly controversial today, but it was certainly off message at the time about race and that kind of stuff. And he lost his job at a university, he was tenured. He got it back through arbitration or mediation, one of the others, I forget which one’s which, but for a while he actually lost his job over it. And everybody on the right, the conservatives would say like, this is terrible, which was true. You shouldn’t lose your job, ’cause you said something, that’s your opinion on your personal social media page, right? Especially as professors were supposed to do this even if we’re dead wrong that’s part of like stoking up this conversation, right? So conservatives rightly and moderates rightly criticize a lot of the left for engaging in pretty oppressive speech policing in ways that were largely damaging and largely like chaotic. I remember there was the one dude who was a I believe a Mexican American dude who was just a truck driver, and someone caught him just rubbing his fingers. He had his hand outside the window of his truck, and he was just rubbing his fingers.
Christopher Ferguson: And somehow they got him right at the moment where it looked like an upside down okay sign, which somehow in 2020 became a white supremacist signal, kind of thing. It was I think a 4chan joke, but people bought it anyway, he lost his job, as far as I know, he never got it back. It didn’t matter that he was Mexican American, didn’t matter that he wasn’t white, didn’t matter that he obviously was just rubbing his fingers at a red light basically. I think even the guy that took the picture eventually admitted it was probably no big deal. But he still lost, as far as I know, and never got it back his job. So it wasn’t just perfume professors that were getting fired or movie stars or whatever, it was regular people in some cases. And now here we are five years later and we have people getting arrested by ICE because they did an op-ed in a newspaper because they’re immigrants, a but they’re legal immigrants, but they wrote the wrong op-ed or they said something. Of course the Charlie Kirk murder prompted a whole bunch of these. Now some of the things people posted were gross and awful, and unwise, I would say, so I’m not defending the comments, but again, it was funny to see this reversal, that cancel culture was bad in 2020, but suddenly it’s perfectly the right thing to do today.
Christopher Ferguson: And I think that’s the problem with both sides, right? Is when one side does it’s oppressive and fascist when the other side does it well, we have a good reason sort of thing. We’re fighting the fascists in order to do this. And so this just seems to be a part of human nature, is we really struggle to be as willing to criticize bad behavior on our own side, whatever that means as we are on the other side. And really, like I said, I’m picking on conservatives a little bit ’cause of the Charlie Kirk murder, but I really struggled with that in 2020, which I think was really a light bulb year for me in many ways in that. I had by that point largely abandoned the idea that the average person was a critical thinker, like reason and data drove most people’s conclusions.
Christopher Ferguson: But I still thought that people with PhDs were critical thinkers who would be persuaded by reason and data. And 2020 was the end of that for me. And I would have these conversations… ‘Cause obviously probably like you, we both work in progressive coded spaces. I would say that I’m an Obama progressive myself. I was a progressive, whatever that meant in 2012, basically. Probably would be central left now. So I had all these conversations with people about like the US is systemically racist. I’m like, “well, here’s data that conflicts with that.” are you interested? “Nope.” [laughter] you’re maybe a… You get all this like, it’s your whiteness that doesn’t let you see. There’s data, it’s just numbers. The numbers aren’t white or black or Hispanic or whatever. But there was that sense of like just people were morally outraged, and when people are in that state they really, really struggle to see the bad behavior of the wrong side. There would be those political me, I hate political means, but there would be… The political memes we’re going around, I would point out like, it’s not true, what they’re saying in here is just inaccurate. Surely, you know that, right? And they’d be like, “Well, it’s just a joke.” Well, if it’s just a joke, why don’t you just tell another joke? Why don’t you just send a meme around that’s just like, about funny cats or something like that.
Christopher Ferguson: Well, no, no, no. This is an important joke if we’re fighting fascism. Okay. So it’s not just a joke? And I would have this kind of like progression of a conversation over these steps where people would start with, it’s just a joke lighten up to “We’re fighting fascism. This is like the end of the democracy.” Okay, pick one, pick one position and stick with it. Because I didn’t think it was just a joke in the beginning, you got me, but now you don’t think this as a joke either, clearly ’cause you think you’re on the barricade fighting fascism when you’re sitting at your keyboard at home with your latte and your air conditioning and that kind of stuff. So, anyway. But yeah, there’s very, very common bias that we have, it’s very, very difficult for us to see flaws in ourselves and in people that we think are close to us or at least on our side.
Adam Omary: One of the things that I appreciate about your book, Catastrophe Chris, is that even though it’s full of many political examples, it’s very balanced in the critiques of cognitive biases that you see on either side of any ideological spectrum. And it’s not just modern issues that you dive into, but to some degree this is just a perennial problem of human nature, going back to at least the Salem witch trials, you discussed in your book, which is, I think both great news and tragic news in different ways, because the great news is, it’s not like society is crumbling before us, and the past was great, but now all this technology is unwinding all the progress we’ve built. On the other hand, though, as you mentioned, even some PhD scientists defaults to tribalism, and despite all the dissertation, despite all of the arguing with data, people cherry pick data, and often seems to default into just intuitive emotional thinking as you detail in your book and all these cognitive biases, it really takes not only training.
Adam Omary: It’s not just like you get the PhD, now you’re a trained scientist, you see the world differently forever, it takes constant upkeep and practice. And you and I hopefully manage to be self-aware. Although I see it in myself, I see when my rational thinking slips and I default into some of these just intuitive arguments. And then fortunately, I have a network of peers and colleagues who can often check me. And it’s wonderful when you’re able to build a culture, I think for all of its flaws, we still have this in academia, maybe more so than anywhere else, where the ideal culture would be one where make sure that your arguments are data-driven, your methodology is clear, peer review that’s not a form of mob consensus, but just allowing people to check their own biases and flaws and reasoning. That’s the ideal at least, I’m an enlightenment humanist at heart.
Christopher Ferguson: Yeah, yeah. And like I said, it’s important to recognize in ourselves that none of us are perfect. It’s also important to recognize that, and I think this has been a problem in the last few years, particularly for what we might call the anti-woke side, which is a very amorphous group of people anyway. But, is that sometimes the people at time one who make exactly the argument you did about like argument should be from data and reasoned and well thought out can themselves slip into nonsense pretty thoroughly [laughter] So the heroes at time one, maybe the villains at time two. And sometimes that may be us. We might be on the right side of the data at one time point and end up finding that we’ve slipped off the rails and just gotten too deep into our own heads at a second time point and being… Having enough humility both in terms of like moral humility and epistemological humility to recognize that sometimes we can just be wrong.
Christopher Ferguson: And there’s no shame in reversing our position if the data shows us that we should do so. And I think that kind of speaks too, that people sometimes talk with a lot of these things about like social contagion and this kind of stuff. But I think a lot of, like, the positions people take really are more about like, just pure on opera and conditioning, right? You take the positions that you get rewarded for taking and I think we have to recognize that that’s a lot of happening in many of people’s public positions. And I think, again, 2020 was a great example that for like six months, everybody was like, “defund the police,: Which I do some criminal justice research. I thought I woke up in opposite land. ‘Cause there’s nothing in criminal justice research that suggests any form of defunding the police is ever going to be effective. If anything, you want to train them better, which is going to cost more money. You need to incentivize them better so you get better people in the jobs and this kinds of stuff.
Christopher Ferguson: “Defund the police, defund the police,” and then a couple years later you realize that some people come forward and other people quietly have said like, well, I never really thought that was going to work, but I was so scared that if I said anything that I would lose my job or my funding, or I wouldn’t be able to get published. I’m thinking about academics here mostly. But so it is interesting and this is over a big moral political issue. But I think that’s true in a broader sense as well. And I’m guilty of this sometimes. I was just talking to a reporter yesterday and she was asking about like different forms of like media research, whatever. And I’ll be upfront and say like, I did video game research because it was cool at the time, ’cause society cared about it at the time. Now society cares less about video game research. So now I’m moving on to social media and smartphone stuff, I’m sort of following the gravy train to some extent. And I’ll just bluntly admit it, that is the case. But on the other hand, I do try to remain like, here’s what the data says. We were talking about my book Catastrophe.
Christopher Ferguson: I probably would’ve sold a lot more copies if I’d said, social media’s bad and smartphones are bad or found a way of like confirming every parent and teacher’s fears about the world. And so I think a lot of people do get incentivized, including scholars do get incentivized by following that narrative because they either want the grant funding, the money, the prestige, the newspaper articles or they’re scared that their peers won’t like them anymore or will ostracize them, or they can’t get published. And I think for example, a lot of the controversy, particularly in the United States over, I know this is a controversial issue, we don’t want to spend much time on it, but like the youth, gender medicine sort of debate that occurred.
Christopher Ferguson: I think a lot of what we’re seeing is a sense of, it was distorted to some extent because some of the scholars that were in that area, were afraid of saying, well, maybe this is a more nuanced so it’s not rah rah, rah, let’s do it for every kid who wants, but maybe there’s some nuances in here we need to keep an eye on. And there was that example of, and I forget the scholar’s name, but it was in the New York Times where one particular scholar who’s well known in this area I just can’t remember names, but she had gotten a big NI… I think it was NIH grant or NSF grant or something like that to study youth general medicine. And then the results apparently were not very positive for it.
Christopher Ferguson: And so she decided not to publish the study because of the political consequences which is as scholars we know, is a really bad reason not to publish data, ’cause you don’t like the politics that will come of it. So anyway, yeah. So I think there’s a lot that happens. And I think the public need to realize that we as scholars are oftentimes incentivized by what’s going on in the news, in politics, in the general public as well. So unfortunately, social narratives can shape science, and that’s not always a great thing.
Adam Omary: I’ve come to appreciate that, and now most of my fear about when science goes wrong, it’s not the things that people often talk and worry about, like people blatantly going against the data or making up the data, but it’s more a matter of, we have so many degrees of freedom and choice as scientists in how to interpret the data. And one thing that stood out to me in your Loneliness article, oftentimes you get technically true claims, but that can be spun in a way that just pack a lot of punch, and that the claim, this came from the Surgeon General’s report that we discussed at the beginning, that loneliness has the same adverse health effects as smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day. And then you read the original study on that, and they have a categorical measure of smoking.
Adam Omary: So there’s people who smoke less than 15 cigarettes per day, and then more than that. And there’s a relatively small effect, or even null effect, but it’s technically true to say, okay, so the loneliness, the small effect was the same as people who fell into the first low smoking category. So you’re making this technically true claim, but people are going to interpret that as though you’re smoking 15 cigarettes a day and it’s the same amount of harm. And in reality, the way we know the statistics work is that, well, probably the bulk of the effect is coming from people in the zero to one range, and if you’re at 15, statistically, you’re almost identical to the next group up, which has obviously a much worse health effect. So it’s really tricky, and you see this in all areas of science, especially those that are most politicized. And sadly as you mentioned, the incentives often do line up for scientists not even to commit any ethical violations, but to maximally shift the narrative within the realm of what’s technically true into whatever sells the population narrative and gets the grant funding.
Christopher Ferguson: Yeah, yeah. It was a very strange comparison. The 15 or less cigarettes a day, so it’s like one to 15 cigarettes. And yeah, it’s technically true, I don’t know. But why compare it to the low smoking group? Why not the high smoking group? Which of course I know why, because the numbers would’ve been completely different from each other. Now again, smoking one to 15 cigarettes is still bad. I’m not in any way encouraging people to smoke any cigarettes, it’s still a bad thing. But I think, yeah, I mean… Yeah, I don’t know what’s in their heads, ’cause I actually reached out to the… So the same person who did that study was the person who wrote the Surgeon General’s advisory. So I reached out to her, she just referred us to her frequently asked question page, which that answered my question, I wouldn’t need to reach out to her.
Christopher Ferguson: So she didn’t really respond to questions about it. But that was… My only possible guess is for using the one to 15 as opposed to, I think it was like 15 to 25 was moderate, and 25 and above was heavy smoking. Why the one to 15 is because those are the numbers that were equal. [laughter] You know what I mean? It’s like that was the comparison that sounded the best, and probably the average person reading that, which would include me, by the way, I didn’t know. I’m not a smoker, I don’t know what 15 cigarettes is in terms of light, medium heavy. Which I think 15 cigarettes sounds like a lot. And in truth, like you said, it’s actually not 15 cigarettes, it’s one to 15 cigarettes, which means like seven and a half somewhere is probably what we’re talking about, which is still bad. I am not telling anybody to smoke cigarettes but is a much milder effect than smoking 25 or more.
Christopher Ferguson: Or also you can kind of, like we we’re talking about this, like increase in alone time and you could technically say Americans are spending the most time alone as has ever been recorded on record. If by ever on record, you mean the last 20 years. And that would be technically true that Americans are spending more time alone than ever on record. But that’s the decrease of 1.7%. So one version of this sounds horrible, and the other sounds like I don’t know, I guess that’s not that big a deal, I don’t know. Maybe some of that is bad, I don’t know. So you can spin the same data point in language in different ways. And I think that’s the other bias right here, is it’s not normal human bias, is that we think in terms of binaries, things are either nothing or they’re a crisis.
Christopher Ferguson: And we don’t have a lot of room in between there for like, okay, maybe this is a small issue, we should keep an eye, that doesn’t exist in our head. So I think everybody to get attention to something, they have to make it sound like a crisis. And I don’t want to go down like a statistical rabbit hole after that, we’ll put all your listeners to sleep here. But this is a consistent problem with a lot of different research areas in medicine and in social science is this issue of effect size. And I’m not going to go into a whole thing about effect size, but it’s entirely true that an article can find a statistically significant effect that is likely noise, that is likely statistical garbage that has no meaning whatsoever in the practical world, that you should not care about this whatsoever.
Christopher Ferguson: This has come up with a few of these, like, there’ve been a couple unpublished studies of cell phone bans in schools that have been hyped as if they provide evidence for these bands. And they don’t, because the effect size is near zero. The actual impact of cell phone bans on student learning is zero, essentially. It does not improve student standardized testing scores or grades or anything else. But when you run 600,000 kids through, an analysis as one of these studies did, everything is statistically significant. Plucking a hair out of their head once a day would’ve been a statistically significant effect on any outcome that you’d picked, essentially. How many clouds are in the sky would’ve been statistically significant. So it would be good maybe a fantasy, but it would be good if the public could get savvy about the sense that oftentimes a lot of the research they’re being sold is garbage.
Christopher Ferguson: And not to fall for this statistically significant kind of language. And we might say, well, okay, maybe this like cell phone ban stuff or social stuff is not that big a deal, what if we get it wrong? Nobody’s going to die, probably. But with medical stuff, it’s dangerous right? I read that book about Alzheimer’s research and what a dumpster fire Alzheimer’s research is, right? Which is tragic for me ’cause it runs in my family, so that’s kind of a personal issue. And it turns out in some of these cases, they were advertising these drugs as being ready for human trials because they showed a significantly different impact on memory retention, but that effect size was near zero. So it was nothing that any of these patients would’ve noticed or their families would’ve noticed.
Christopher Ferguson: And unfortunately, in some of the cases, these drugs were dangerous and could cause brain aneurysms and brain bleeding and things like that as side effects. So, yeah. I don’t think that for the most… And maybe in that case maybe there was some bad ethics in there, profit motive. But I think in most cases, the scholars don’t mean badly, but there is a huge amount of science misinformation that comes from scientists themselves because they are marketing a lot of real poor quality threshold, near zero effects, as if they are meaningful and supportive of various policies or whatever else. And that is unfortunate. We need much greater rigor even around this issue of effect sizes, and unfortunately we are not rigorous either in medicine or in social science around that issue right now.
Adam Omary: Another thing that’s refreshing in your book, Chris, is that you often try to ground the comparisons, including of these real concerns, like small effect sizes of things worsening say in the last 10, 20 years, but grounded in historical evidence of overall how much better our lives are compared to really most humans who have ever lived before. If you’re measuring things like violence or life expectancy or food availability, pretty much we’re living longer, safer, healthier, wealthier lives than ever before. And a lot of people don’t recognize that, but it makes sense why we don’t recognize that, given that we have these evolved tendencies to price in the good and focus on the threat.
[laughter]
Christopher Ferguson: You get a lot of nostalgia bias, right? So people tend to look back on the past and think it was better than it was. So that’s why we’re seeing a lot of this. Kids should live like they did in the ’70s and ’80s where we all got together at the playground and picked up a game of kickball and hold hands and sung kumbaya, and the sun was always shining, but somehow the leaves are still green and it was always 72 degrees, and everything was absolutely perfect. And I can tell you that was not the reality of growing up in the ’70s and ’80s. It was boring, oftentimes you couldn’t always find the friends, half the times the friends would bully you. It wasn’t like all the kids were nice to each other.
Christopher Ferguson: Bullying was rampant and that kind of stuff. If the weather sucked, you couldn’t go outside and there was only three channels of television, there was nothing to do. And again, those kids had the highest suicide rates, highest violent crime rates, highest drug use rates, et cetera, et cetera. It was not a utopia, it’s not something you wanted to go back to. So I always get a kick out of this idea that like everybody like went out and looked at trees. People complained about us in those days of spending all our time inside watching television. So that’s the reality that we live with, even though the television was crap. I watched more Cheers, reruns and taxi reruns, if I’m going to pay a penance in the afterlife, it’ll be for all the time I spent watching Taxi, my God all that wasted time. Not even a very good show, I’m sorry. And I knew it while I was watching it, there was just nothing else to do.
Christopher Ferguson: But if you think about like our ancestral past, everybody has this thing about, “oh, indigenous societies,” and I don’t care if you’re talking about the Irish, like I said, I’m… They were the Celts, they’re my indigenous ancestors or Native Americans, or indigenous Chinese or Africans or whatever, we’re all the same. But essentially, forensic anthropology is estimate that the male homicide rate was like 25%. If you were a male in most indigenous historical societies 10,000 years ago, the odds of you being killed by another man were about 25%, think about that. The absolute rarity of being killed by another man as a male today by comparison to that, I don’t think there’s any comparable estimate of like how many women experience sexual assault. I would best guess say almost universal, essentially and we can debate sexual assault rates today, and the estimates range everywhere from like 2 to 25% but that’s much better than nearly 100% that probably would’ve been experienced by women in our indigenous past.
Christopher Ferguson: So it is funny how people kind of like glorify the past and I think… Here’s with medicine, like, “Oh, I’m going to give up a modern medicine. I’m going to use like ancient herbal medicine.” Like you know those people live to 45. You know what I mean? Like you can just look at their skeletons and see their riddle wood parasites and missing their teeth and all kinds of other stuff. They did not live well these folks. So, yes, modern medicine has many flaws, I just criticize some of it with the Alzheimer’s research. So there definitely are flaws, I’m not saying it’s perfect. It’s like modern criminal justice systems, I’m not going to say they’re perfect, but they’re much better than what our ancestors had to deal with even 200 years ago, let alone 10,000 years ago.
Adam Omary: But Chris, despite your book being called Catastrophe, it ends on a pretty optimistic note. We talked a lot about these different cognitive biases, like my side bias, confirmation bias, binary thinking, and you go through many more in the book. So obviously once we’re aware of them, we can hopefully seek to limit them and instead prioritize truth seeking nuance, a broad sort of humanism rather than tribalism. Any other of these adaptive psychological traits that we ought to cover to end on a positive note for human progress?
Christopher Ferguson: Yeah. There are two things that I can think of. One is simply in terms… People do listen to data. We just talked a whole bunch of ways they don’t. But they do, you just have to be super patient with them. Most people are not going to back down in the middle of an argument and admit they’re wrong. And oftentimes when you persuaded people, you may never know it you’ll never interact with them again. So persuasion can feel very unfruitful, it can feel very unrewarding. And you never really know how much you’ve persuaded people oftentimes until 5, 10, 15 years later. Now I have had occasions where people, in some cases, like even like a full blown argument. Like I thought, maybe we’ll never talk again after this. A week or two weeks or a month later did come back and say, you know what I actually thought about what you said, and I actually sort of agree with some, maybe not all of the points you made. And then usually you try to reciprocate, say, well you made good points too, and you eventually find some common ground. So my point there is like repeating data over and over does work and being patient and trying not to look like the lunatic, you know what I mean? Think about the civil rights movement, that’s how they won, right? Is that they were clearly not the lunatic in that debate. So try not to be the crazy person in the debate as much.
Christopher Ferguson: So you have to be patient, try to keep your calm, none of us are perfect. I’ve lost my calm before I’m not going to say I haven’t but trying to keep your calm is the way to persuade people and recognize that you may not get feedback that… That operating conditioning may not be there to give you that rewarding feedback that you so desire. The other thing you talk about personal traits that I like to highlight I think is really undervalued and sometimes even deliberately attacked is this idea of stoicism. I find the research that stoicism is a good aspect of resiliency to be pretty compelling. And my both clinical and personal observation is first off, like a lot of like CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy essentially is trying to teach stoicism, right?
Christopher Ferguson: With a sense of like, okay, you have this belief, so test it against reality. What are some alternative hypotheses that may explain the same event? What is the evidence you have for each of these and that kind of stuff, how can you approach this more intellectual rather than emotional that kind of stuff. Or like, very common elements of problem solving techniques are all kind of elements of CBT. And I think what’s happened a lot in the last 10 years is that we’ve told people to do the opposite of that, right? Like immerse yourself in your feelings and explore every nook and cranny of your trauma and this kind of stuff, and your mental health becomes your identity and that’s going back to like the coddling hypothesis to some extent.
Christopher Ferguson: And I think there’s some reasonable critique of those societal trends. And I actually find like trying to intellectualize your way through things actually does seem to be related to more positive outcomes. And so I think that it goes back to, I was just talking about persuasion in the sense of like trying to give people data. On the other side being able to receive data also and change our hypotheses about the world and about ourselves in accordance with the data is very, very healthy. And I think that’s what healthy people tend to do. And I’ll end with one anecdote that… So my wife is actually a very wise person, and when we were dating, I was taking her out to her restaurant and I was doing the gentlemanly thing where I was holding the door, she went through, and then another woman went through after I held the door open for another woman who was just right behind us.
Christopher Ferguson: And this other woman barely looked at me, didn’t thank me, just went through the door, like I was a door stop essentially. And I kind of took it personal, that was rude or whatever. And we sat down to dinner, I said, did you see what that woman did? She didn’t even thank me as I held the door for her. And I was taking it personally. So my wife pointed out to me, said, well, you don’t know what’s going on with her. You’re interpreting it as personal, but she might be having a bad day, she might be having some personal crisis that’s absorbing her thoughts so she’s just distracted, it probably has nothing to do with you whatsoever. So she was doing CBT with me, basically in a way. And that’s a hypothesis testing. It’s like, oh yeah, there are these alternative hypotheses for what happened there. And when I realized that, I’m like, “Yeah there’s nothing for me to be angry about here it doesn’t affect the rest of my day. Why be angry about it?” and I think trying… Obviously I’m imperfect ’cause I didn’t do it at first, I did it only on her prompting. We’re all imperfect at this, but trying to adapt this mindset of stoicism, intellectualization, even though a lot of the narrative seems to be pushing us in the opposite direction, I think is a good personal quality to try to develop if we can.
Adam Omary: Thank you very much for your time, Chris. That’s a good optimistic note to end on.
Christopher Ferguson: Yeah. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciated the conversation.