February 22, 2019--Coddling of the American Mind

Greg Lukianoff's and Jon Haidt's, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure, offers a convincing analysis of how the rise of "fearful parenting"; the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play; and the new world of social media that have engulfed teenagers have led to major changes in childhood itself. Much of it not for the better.

As a sidebar, there is an excellent summary of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and how the issues it was developed to address are among the developmental consequences of this new childhood.

CBT focuses on a cognitive feedback loop in which irrational negative beliefs can produce powerful negative feelings, which in turn drive clients' reasoning, motivating them to find evidence to support their negative, emotion-based beliefs. This produces a cognitive triad that can cause depression and a negative pattern of self-regard: "I'm no good," "My world is bleak," and "My future is hopeless."

CBT therapists work with clients to help them break the disempowering feedback cycle (which they call schemas). If people work to examine these beliefs and consider counterevidence, it frequently gives them some relief from negative emotions so that they can hopefully be released from them and become more open to questioning their negative feelings, thereby rising from their depression and becoming more positively oriented and activated.

I have found this approach to be helpful in my own life and thought it might be for yours as well.

To become less theoretical and more specific, the list below shows nine of the most common cognitive distortions that people learn to recognize while undergoing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.  

EMOTIONAL REASONING:  Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.  "I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out."  

CATASTROPHIZING:  Focussing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely.  "It would be terrible if I failed."  

OVERGENERALIZING:  Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident.  "This generally happens to me.  I seem to fail at a lot of things."

DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as "black-and-white thinking, ""all-or-nothing thinking," and "binary thinking"):  Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms.  "I get rejected by everyone," or "It was a complete waste of time."

MIND READING:  Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts.  "He thinks I'm a loser."

LABELLING:  Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking).  "I'm undesirable," or "He's a rotten person."

NEGATIVE FILTERING:  You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives.  "Look at all the people who don't like me."

DISCOUNTING POSITIVES:  Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgement.  "That's what wives are supposed to do-so it doesn't count when she's nice to me," or "Those successes were easy, so they don't matter."

BLAMING:  Focussing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself.  "She's to blame for the way I feel now," or "My parents caused all my problems."

May 5, 2104--Confirmation Bias

For years I enjoyed early mornings with Morning Joe. But, since it is beginning to feel predictable, lately I find myself switching back and forth between Joe, CBS This Morning, and even CNN's New Day. Never mind the conservative zombie cyborgs on Fox News' alliterative Fox and Friends.

Charlie Rose on CBS feels about as grumpy as I, like me not entirely happy to be up early. So I can relate to that. New Day, on the other hand, is more or less devoted to news, but it is disconcerting to watch Chris Cuomo on CNN, who looks just like New York governor Andrew Cuomo's twin and sounds just like his father, former New York governor, Mario. Again, not fully clearheaded that early in the morning, this can be confusing.

My drifting from Morning Joe appears not just to be an isolated phenomenon but is reflected in the ratings of these four morning shows, especially the cable networks' three. According to a report in the New York Times, Joe has slipped to third place among the cable shows. F&F continues to be number one with ratings that equal both New Day's, which has taken over second place, and Morning Joe's. Especially among younger viewers who, for some reason, are considered to be the more desirable.

Cantankerous, good-ol-boy, Morning Joe Scarborough, is not being diplomatic in his reactions. He is quoted as saying, "CNN has made itself a punch line on the Daily Show for its phony breaking-news headlines and breathless coverage of random ocean debris." (He failed to mention that Jon Stewart on the Daily Show devoted an entire segment to making fun of . . . Morning Joe, for being so cozy with the powerful.)

But Joe has a point.

New Day, and the rest of CNN, vaulted over Joe and all other MSNBC programs by devoting almost all of its time to a constant stream of alleged breaking-news about Malaysian ill-fated flight 370, with much of this breaking news really a constant rehashing of "news" that "broke" hours or even days before. It seems that on CNN there is no statute of limitations on anything they deem to be new news.

On the other hand, MSNBC itself gleefully devoted dawn-to-dusk coverage for weeks to the political downfall of Chris Christie. And now are spending most of their time expressing outrage about estranged LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling and the botched execution in Oklahoma.

While over at Fox, it has not been all-news-all-the-time or we-report-you-decide: it has been all-Benghazi-all-the time in their attempt to preemptively bring down the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

But, in addition to noticing myself drifting away from Morning Joe, I am also finding myself losing interest in Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, late evening hosts of their own shows on MSNBC.

They are feeling to me as doctrinaire and strident coming from the left as the hosts of Fox's evening lineup are from the right. Yes, their views are more fact-based than Fox's and Fox's are more opinion-based, but both are becoming unwatchable because their views are more and more predictable.

In talking with others, liberal as well as conservative friends, they are saying much the same thing; but, for the most part, all are continuing to watch their favorite shows on Fox or MSNBC.

I've been wondering why they, and I, continue to tune in if in fact so much is repetitious and predictable.

I have come to conclude we watch because pretty much everyone on Fox and MSNBC, is predictable. We tune in to have our views confirmed.

In cognitive theory this is called confirmation bias. How we search for new information and interpretations that confirm our perceptions and avoid information and points of view that contradict prior or already formed beliefs.

Since genopolitical research is finding that there may be a genetic basis for our political perspectives and attitudes (see The Righteous Mind), the pull to have these deeply-based views constantly affirmed fits right in with the drumbeat programming on the most ideological TV talk shows.

This is not unlike the need to eat. Feeding the mind a steady diet of ideological views is perhaps not so different from feeding the body.

The body human and the body politics.