Life on Mars – The Psychology of a New World

In response to my last entry, Emmy asked, “I wonder what [effect] living on another planet would have on the human psyche?”

Great question!

The honest answer is “no-one knows”.

But that’s no fun, so let’s speculate. There are several different strands to the question:

1. Who would volunteer to terraform and colonise a new planet?
2. What psychological difficulties might they face on the long journey, and in the initial phases of the colonisation?
3. How would their future generations cope with life on a planet which they are not evolved to inhabit?

The first question is actually relatively easy to answer, as humanity has had many waves of colonisation right here on Earth. Pioneers tend to be a bit odd, psychologically. I think you have to be somewhat detached from the main currents of humanity in order to be willing to go through that kind of suffering. The role tends to attract people with exaggerated personalities; an eclectic bunch of narcissists, zealots, chancers, criminals, dreamers, oddballs, misfits and the desperate. Only these people would volunteer for the hardship involved in colonising a new frontier.

Even if you went to great lengths to select a team of professionals for the job, there would be an inevitable self-selection bias – only those with extreme character traits would volunteer, and they’d do their very best to manipulate the results of any psychometric tests designed to weed out the more eccentric or dangerous among them.

Given this rather volatile mix of personalities, it’s relatively straightforward to answer the second question. There would be friction, and lots of it. Mission planners would probably attempt to schedule the colonisers’ days as intensively as possible, to stop them getting bored and getting on each others’ nerves. In fact, Nasa implicitly recognises these risks already; a glance at how closely planned astronaut time is even in close orbit demonstrates they recognise the need to keep egos firmly in place, though of course they have a myriad other stated reasons for tight scheduling too.

A long space journey, combined with the freedom from active supervision that colonisation would entail would allow psychological pressures to escalate, grudges to form and underlying traits to blossom into full-blown disorders and conflicts. The stress of confinement is well-known to do this, as anyone who’s visited a prison can testify. And the initial phases of colonisation on any new planet would very much echo a prison environment with cramped living quarters, people living in close proximity to each other, complex and conflicting hierarchies, and very limited time outside of those living quarters.

It would be wise to send staff trained in psychological work on the mission, but I rather fear they may end up the first to lynched!

Assuming the terraforming and colonisation project managed to struggle through these early phases of conflict, loneliness  and hardship, it’s possible to envisage subsequent waves of colonisers (with more rounded personalities) eventually emigrating to the new planet and the population settling down into some kind of familiar framework. But would their children have a significantly different psychological make-up to Earth-born children?

Our behaviour is complex blend of genetics, upbringing and environmental pressure. In the short-term, there would be little genetic difference between the colonisers’ children and Earth’s, apart from to note that since the colonising population will have a high concentration of people with extreme personalities and quite possibly mental disorder, it may be that their children will share that proportionally higher genetic burden. Those personalities also affect their upbringing. That is to say, the culture of a pioneer planet will undoubtedly differ from Earth, and not always in a positive manner.

But will the different physical environment have an effect? This is difficult to answer in detail but in general, Environmental Psychologists would say yes. Different physical environments on Earth during childhood have an impact on development, attitudes, and interpersonal relationships. This isn’t some kind of psychospiritual Feng Shui, but the natural impact of our surroundings on human interaction. Unless managed carefully, it would be quite possible for the colonisers to breed a generation of really quite psychologically troubled inviduals.

I’m an optimist, so I think they’d muddle through eventually. Over time (and further generations) a more acceptable pattern of human society would develop. But put it this way, I wouldn’t want to be in the first couple of generations of interplanetary colonisers!

Personal Identity: Form and Content meet

Viktor & Rolf exploring extreme content in classic form, photo by Blommers & Schumms for GQ Style Italy

How do we define our personal identity?

A recent theme I’ve explored has been to understand personality through Jungian typology (and the later Myers-Brigg typology which is heavily based on Jung’s Psychological Types). Our personality governs how we perceive ourselves and how we interact with others. In that sense, it’s possible to conceive of personality as being the Form of our personal identity. It is the essential shape and outline of who we are, but lacks the detailed depth that comes with what we say and the actions we take. Those words and deeds are the Content. If Form and Content come together in harmony, a clear sense of personal identity – our personal brand – emerges. It is a brand that will make sense to others because it makes sense to ourselves.

This is a powerful and flexible way of viewing identity as it allows for active practical interventions to adjust the brand to our liking. The first step is to identify our natural Form; our core personality. Introspection and personality tests like MBTI can help with this. Secondly, we can determine whether we are living our lives (the Content) in harmony with that Form. For instance, are we in a job or relationship that naturally complements our personality, or are we trying to blend immiscible liquids together? Finally, we can adjust the Content to better fit in with the Form by making changes to our lifestyle that allow us to maximise our strengths and minimise our weaknesses. If need be, Form can also be nudged slightly in a different direction, but Content is almost always much simpler to change. It is easier to fill an amphora with wine instead of oil than it is to create a completely new vessel.

I often relate psychological principles to clothes on this blog but in this case, it was clothing that led me to this line of thinking. Consider a man wearing a tailored suit. The basic form is set by the core nature of these items; a jacket and trousers. However, the form comes with individual variation: number of buttons, vents, lapel size, degree of shoulder padding, gorge height and so on. The content is also highly variable: the fabric material, weight, pattern, colour and so forth.  A suit with conservative form will naturally take to conservative content while a suit with fashion-forward form may find its optimal expression with equally unusual content.

However, this is not always so. Sometimes a conservatively cut suit can be combined with an unusual colour to create a strikingly eccentric look that is made all the more interesting because of those conservative boundaries of form. And sometimes an aggressively-styled suit is rendered more pleasing to the eye by using a conservative cloth. Different designers play with these two continua to define their own brand identities. For example, Thom Browne often uses conservative classic cloth with an extreme shrunken form, whereas Ozwald Boateng has been known for vividly leery colours on a fairly classic suit. Tom Ford sometimes ventures to wild extremes on both axes with his heavily stylized suits in bold plaids, whereas Brooks Brothers is often conservative in cut and cloth.

Form and Content combine to define our personal identity. If yours seems unclear, identify your natural Form and then choose the Content that harmonises best with it to suit the identity you want to project.

Giving the finger

Image by Daniel Stark via Flickr

Add this story to the ever-growing list of human conditions now linked to the size of your finger.

It describes a correlation between the relative sizes of your index and ring fingers and your risk of developing prostate cancer. For the men in the audience who are now looking down, it’s your right hand you need to examine.

If your index finger is longer than your ring finger, that’s correlated with a lower than average risk of developing prostate cancer, and vice versa. As for causation, well, that bit isn’t entirely clear, but finger length is associated with in-utero exposure to testosterone, and testerone levels are thought to affect the risk of prostate cancer, so you can vaguely guess that there may be some form of causal relationship, even if the details aren’t worked out yet.

Whether there’s any realistic utility to this minor discovery is another matter entirely, but it’s the latest in a long line of attempts to link outer appearance to inner biology. Sticking just to fingers, we’ve also been informed that long ring fingers are associated with improved mathematical ability but worse literacy, with higher earning power, protection from heart disease, homosexuality, and depression.

In truth, most of these are just demonstrations of correlation rather than fully worked through causal pathways, though potential causal relationships again revolve around the relative levels of testosterone to oestrogen in the womb. And they all discuss relative risk, rather than an absolute/inviolate relationship between one factor and the other.

While there’s little doubt that the methodology used in these studies is somewhat better and more reliable than that used a century or two ago, I can’t help but be reminded of the science of phrenology, where it was thought that man’s personality could be determined by the bumps on his head.

On a more sinister note, the idea of linking internal qualities to external physical attributes has been, and is, commonly used by propagandists and political cartoonists. In the past, this has included exaggerated racial caricatures, emphasising certian features such as long noses or large lips. More recently, we’ve seen cartoons and photo-manipulations such as the Bush-Chimp and Obama-Chimp which show that this remains a potent technique of reinforcing differentiation between a self group vs another group.

One can argue that there’s a difference between using scientifically-validated relationships to make a point and using arbitrary similarities, and I agree that there is. But the world is rarely so sensible as to actually make note of the difference.

Related Articles

• Is finger length a clue to increased risk of getting prostate cancer? (dailymail.co.uk)
• Study links finger length to prostate cancer risk (reuters.com)
• Finger length is a marker for risk of prostate cancer (telegraph.co.uk)

The Anti-hero

There are two kinds of anti-hero: the Everyman, and the character that contributors to the TV Tropes website would call the Magnificent Bastard. I’ve always loved reading and watching the exploits of the second kind of anti-hero.

The Everyman type is typically thrown into a difficult situation, fights against adversity and his baser nature and at the end of the piece, if not actually triumphant, at least survives in some way to fight another day. These are the Holden Caulfields, Arthur Dents, Winston Smiths and even Homer Simpsons of the world. They’re buffeted about, occasionally managing to stand up and make a difference, but rarely have full insight into what they’re doing and more usually get out of dangerous situations through a combination of luck and tenacity.

The Magnificent Bastard is entirely different. He is still a flawed character, but his flaw is not one of general mediocrity but that of a gaping mental chasm created by a deep psychological imbalance. These are the characters one loves to hate, the characters that are not all unsympathetic to the reader/viewer but those that society tells us we should not really be sympathising with. The sympathy is generated not so much because we approve of their actions, but because their actions reveal something of their flaw, and we – perhaps still undeservedly – admire them for their attempt to compensate for their flaw. Not for them a carefully planned course of therapy to find inner peace; these characters take revenge on the world that they feel made them this way.

Classics of the type would be Milton’s Lucifer (histrionic narcissist), Shakespeare’s Iago (morbidly jealous) and Macbeth (inferiority complex), Dorian Grey (another narcissist) and Machiavelli’s idealised Prince. Modern equivalents would be Patrick Bateman (narcissistic rage) and psychopaths like Hannibal Lecter, Gordon Gekko and James Bond. Not that they’re all men (though there tends to be preponderance of male characters), as women such as Becky Sharp, Miranda Frost and The White Witch also get in on the act.

I started thinking about this topic while chatting about the 80s supersoap Dallas elsewhere. You may have read recently that Larry Hagman (who of course played star of the show JR Ewing) recently won substantial damages against Citigroup for mismanagement of his investments. Naturally, that led to a slew of JR-related puns and quips, plus some nostalgic reminiscing of what a fun bit of escapist entertainment Dallas was. The character that made the show so watchable was JR Ewing, and he’s pretty much an archetypal example of the Magnificent Bastard antihero.

What stops him being a cartoon villain is that his character never acts out of pure evil, but always from a position that can be understood and, on a good day, sympathised with. He has a slew of what you might call “daddy issues”, and one could ascribe a good deal of his actions to a feeling that he could never quite measure up to Jock Ewing’s legacy, and a (probably failed) desire on his part for his son John Ross to never feel that way about him as a father figure. His extreme competitiveness with Jock and Bobby, his dismissive behaviour towards Gary and Ray, his general perception of people as dumb instruments to be manipulated, and his virgin madonna/whore dichotomous attitude towards women are all consistent with a theme of male inadequacy and arrested development due to an overbearing yet unloving father.

This is also probably what lets his character connect so brilliantly with the audience, especially men in the audience. By transposing the Jock Ewing father figure onto a patriachal and hierarchical society, we enjoy watching JR do all the things we, as individuals with a more rounded and mature personalities, could never do. He’s a classic anti-hero, collecting power and feeding off other people’s emotional distress, as a substitute for inner peace.

Characters are compelling because of their psychological reality, even when the that reality is stretched to an extreme caricature. We love reading about and watching anti-heros because they let us live out a few of our fantasies – even those we do not like to admit to ourselves – and this fantasy allows  us to stabilise our own psychological attitude to the world.

PS. if any of the characters mentioned above don’t instantly bring the source to mind, your reading/viewing list is, in order of appearance from the illustrating photo down: The Devil’s Advocate, Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984, The Simpsons, Paradise Lost, Othello, Macbeth, Portrait of Dorian Grey, The Prince, American Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Wall Street, James Bond (any), Vanity Fair, The Devil Wears Prada, The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, and, of course, Dallas. An eclectic list to keep you busy for a while!

Testing Times

It may be the August Bank Holiday, but there’s no rest for the wicked this weekend.

I’m busy teaching on the Get into Medical School course I run alongside my good friend Neel. Today was training on the UKCAT course we offer specifically for that exam; tomorrow will be our regular general course covering all aspects of applying to study medicine, including how to choose a medical school, the application process, writing a good personal statement and interview advice.

The course is generally fun to teach, and it’s good to meet tomorrow’s doctors. But I have to admit that the UKCAT day (and the BMAT one we run for that exam later in the year) can be a little tiring due to the vast amount of content we have to cover in a relatively short space of time. There are a lot of worked examples we have to get through, and those can feel a little repetitive at times. That’s good for the students of course, as that’s how they will learn, but it is quite draining for those teaching.

More fundamentally, I find it a shame that these students have to sit all these extra exams. When I applied to medical school, we just had to sit our A-levels. UKCAT and BMAT didn’t exist, and if you were applying to Oxford, you could opt to sit a special entrance exam instead. If you chose to do so, and did well on that exam and the subsequent interview, you could obtain an unconditional offer to get in, which really took the pressure off the rest of the final year at school. I was fortunate enough to get one of those offers, and it certainly made that last year lots of fun!

Exams such as UKCAT and BMAT were introduced with the dual aims of better distinguishing between candidates with equally good A-level predictions, as well as being fairer in terms of testing potential and intelligence rather than differentially rewarding those from schools with the funding to coach students towards good A-levels and those with fewer resources.

I would argue that they more or less meet the first objective; they certainly provide universities with more data with which differentiate candidates. However this would not have been necessary if A-levels themselves adequately distinguished between the merely good and the truly great. The introduction of an A* grade at A-level may help reverse this trend, but given the experience of the starred grade at the lower GCSE level, I rather doubt it will do more than encourage further grade inflation.

The tests certainly fail the test of levelling the playing field between rich/well-resourced students and those from less privileged backgrounds. Firstly, the very act of creating more hurdles will discourage those from traditionally less aspirational, poorer-prepared and system-unsavvy backgrounds. Secondly, each of these extra exams carries with it a entry fee. This is set at a relatively trivial level for the well-off, but this is not always the case for others. Finally, both tests reward extra coaching and preparation since familiarity with the tests improves performance dramatically, regardless of what the examiners claim. Thus, those with the awareness to practice in advance, get coaching from their school, or attend courses like ours, will score better results than those who do not. In a very real sense, our course negates that general bias somewhat, since at least our course is a relatively small one-off cost, compared to ongoing expensive school fees, though of course it still rewards those who attend as opposed to those who do not.

The real solution would be to make A-levels themselves more challenging and more discriminatory (in the best sense of the word), to distinguish not just between good and bad candidates, but also between good, very good and excellent students. And then to prevent that discriminatory challenge from being eroded by progressive grade inflation.

If all that could be achieved, we could return to the older, simpler, days when A-levels alone were sufficient exams and candidates would not be subject to so much unnecessary stress from the whole process.

The limits of Behaviourism: a quicker way to skin a cat

I recently had an interesting discussion with a behaviourist psychologist regarding the concept of personality.

Their position was that personality as an independent concept had no value, and that everything that personality purported to explain, could more simply be explained via Occam’s Razor as being a chain of learned behaviours instead. This radical behaviourism has its roots in the work of B.F. Skinner. I would suggest that this approach is essentially a philosophical position on the nature of the mind.

Skinner was a hard determinist – he was certain that everything could be explained through a causal chain of events and that once this sequence was set in motion, the outcome could be predicted. In many respects, this is a very scientific approach – it relies on an external empirical value system. Introspection has no value, because there is no causa sui. Everything can be interpreted within the context of past learning, presumably stretching back to Aristotle’s Prime Mover.

A psychodynamic approach (such as Freud or Jung used), or even a cognitive approach (such as Chomsky’s) takes a very different philosophical approach. Essentially, these models allow for the concept of free will, and so are essentially compatabilist in nature (though Jung’s model is almost libertarian in its allowance for transcendental, non-deterministic, effects). They either temporarily put to one side whether there is a causal chain that might theoretically some day be understood by physical/empirical scientific study, or outright disregard that possibility to the point of effectively denying it.

Instead, they focus on the internal world of the subject, using its current construct as the starting point. These approaches are essentially intergrative rather than reductionist. As such, they are to some extent built on scientific sand – we can never truly know whether our self-image/mental construct has external validity. But on the other hand, there is a very good existential intellectual argument to suggest that even the physical models of Skinner are also based on the experimenter’s subjective understanding of the world, and so are equally open to the assertion that they lack the validity of being “real”.

At least introspective approaches openly acknowledge this uncertainty, rather than hide it behind a veneer of objective science.

I suggest that this introspective element paradoxically allows psychoanalytic (and also cognitive) approaches to be powerful short-cuts to understanding behaviour; one no longer needs to decipher the contingency chain, one simply needs to see the overall emergent pattern. It is not scientific – an introspective approach can never be – because it is unique to the individual and relationship. Its power is that it is heuristic rather than algorithmic.

I then posed the following thought to my professional colleague: since they leaned heavily towards a behaviourist model, whereas I have sympathy with a psychodynamic model, how did we end up with those different philosophical leanings?

To answer that, a strict radical behaviourist would have to decipher the detailed chain of events responsible for structuring a mindset that favours that worldview. Unless one believes in the transcendental, I would agree that it’s theoretically possible to do that, but it would take a lot of time and effort and at some point, the haziness of human memory would make it impossible on a practical level.

But if you take a personality based approach, one can get to working explanatory hypothesis much faster. It is a useful short-cut to finding avenues to approach a solution. The avenues may end up being blind alleys sometimes but that’s the price you pay for using a heuristic technique.

Cognition is so complex an emergent phenomenon that it strikes me as, well, tiresome to go through the nuts and bolts of explanining its emergence through behaviourism, when there’s a potential short-cut there for the taking.

From Empedocles to Employment

About 450 years before Christ was born, a theory was devised that may well determine whether you get your next job.

The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles was born in ancient Agrigentum in Sicily, and later turned down the offer of kingship of his town. Instead, he created a theory that gained him more long-term fame than any mere temporal title could offer. He taught that everything in the world was made up the opposing forces of Love and Strife on varying blends of four ultimate elements – Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

A little later, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Hippocrates, dubbed the Father of Medicine, incorporated this concept of four elements into his theory of four essential humours making up the human body. He held that Blood corresponded to Air, Yellow Bile to Fire, Black Bile to Earth and Phlegm to Water. These four humours were held in balance in a healthy body and mind, but in the sickly, one could predominate. This could led to overexpression of certain unhelpful personality traits, or temperaments.

Thus, excess blood made one sanguine – a tendency to be extroverted, social, creative and compassionate but with the risk of losing focus. Too much yellow bile and one is choleric: an ambitious, hyper-dominant doer. A surfeit of black bile leads to thoughtfulness and creativity but also moody melancholy. And the phlegmatics are relaxed, stable pillars of the community but often shy and perhaps slightly dull.

This theory of the four humours held sway through subsequent centuries, and the Muslim physician and scholar Avicenna extended, refined and further disseminated the concept through the civilised world when he wrote his Canon of Medicine in the year 1025 AD.

But with the scientific advances of the 19th century, it seemed that by the dawn of the 20th century the theory of the four humours was destined to fade away. Then Carl Jung wrote his seminal Psychological Types in 1921, postulating that all humanity could be classified according to how they perceive and judge the world and how that is modified by their attitude. Katharine Cook Briggs read the book, and with her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, extended the theory further by adding a description of how the individual then interacts with the world. Four dimensions of personality, each with two polar opposites, leading to a total of 16 combinations. And with the help of psychometric testing, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was created, allowing anyone to take a short questionnaire and be classified into their MBTI type. Once taken, you’re assigned a four letter classification (I’m a pretty clearly defined INTJ, for instance).

But how does this relate to the four humours? Well, David Keirsey has developed his own theory of four temperaments which happens to map quite closely onto the historical four temperaments. Keirsey calls them artisan, idealist, guardian and rational. The Ancients would respectively name them sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. And Keirsey’s four temperaments have a lot of overlap with the middle two letters of MBTI classifications.

Thus, an NT is a rational, a phlegmatic, and – to take this right back to Empedocles’ elements – is made of lots of water. For completion, idealists are fiery NF cholerics, artisans airy SP sanguines and guardians earthy SJ melancholics.

Whether these theories are right or wrong, both the MBTI and Keirsey’s Temperament Sorter are widely implemented psychometric tests today, used by career counsellors and potential employers to decide whether applicants are suited to particular jobs. Just think about that next time you wonder whether you’ll get a callback for an interview after completing one of these tests.

You’ll owe it all to an Ancient Greek who decided that he’d rather be a philosopher than a king.