Actors’ representation of American political discourse.

Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler examine major psychological currents that contribute to dysfunction in American politics in their book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics.

They gathered a wealth of information from the American National Election Studies data to explain the current polarized disarray of American political discourse. In particular, they sourced a four-question inventory to sort respondents along a continuum from authoritarian to non-authoritarian. The questions have to do with how people view authority and control in parent/child relationships.

Hetherington and Weiler don’t provide a convenient one-line definition of the term authoritarianism because the concept is complex, and they wanted to avoid just the sort of negative bias that I read into it.  My understanding, based on the book as well as a bit of Googling, is that authoritarianism appears to be a type of cognitive deficit style.

“The thing that makes authoritarians distinctive is their reliance on established authorities [...] we suspect that those who score high in authoritarianism have (I) a greater need for order and, conversely less tolerance for confusion or ambiguity, and (2) a propensity to rely on established authorities to provide that order. [...]

Specifically, those scoring high in authoritarianism will probably tend to rely more on emotion and instinct than those scoring low because they (I) have, on average, fewer cognitive tools and (2) feel more threat from the often ambiguous nature of the complicated world around them.” _(p.34)

The most difficult thing about reading the book was maintaining my objectivity. It was very easy to read strong confirmation of my own biases into many aspects of the discussion. Of course I scored myself. I’m not good at dichotomous survey questions. After I mentally qualified my answers, “Yes, but….” I estimate my personal score is around -2. Beyond non-authoritarian. Anti-authoritarian.

My impression from the book and my own anthropological observation is that most authoritarians tend to be republican, white, Christian, heterosexual traditionalists. They want things to be the way they have always been. They tend to favor forceful, aggressive political candidates. The world is black and white for authoritarians, and they don’t let a little thing like objective reality get in the way of their opinions. These are the “shoot first, ask questions later” people.

Although authoritarians are generally less rational and more reactive than non-authoritarians, it turns out that even non-authoritarians commit serious errors in cognition when they feel threatened.

While authoritarians tend to feel threatened all the time from the diversity and complexity around them, non-authoritarians tend to remain calm most of the time. Non-authoritarians briefly trended toward the authoritarian side of the spectrum immediately following 9/11. President George W. Bush’s approval rating was around 90% shortly after the attacks. Fear erodes cognition for all of us, but the non-authoritarians return to deliberative calm when the threat recedes.

The republican political elite is masterful at reminding its base to be afraid, very afraid. The more authoritarian candidates are currently arousing the passions of their base with seriously scary issues like these:

Teh Gay:

Teh Birth Control:

At the extremes of the authoritarian spectrum, it really is impossible for authoritarians and non-authoritarians to imagine what the hell is wrong with people on other side. Which is both fascinating and incredibly depressing.

I contacted Jonathan Weiler via email with some questions. Both he and Marc Hetherington were very generous with their time. The discussion follows:

Me: After hearing your recent interview on the Point of Inquiry podcast, I read your fascinating book.

I find the authoritarian paradigm as you and Hetherington describe it incredibly compelling, but I have a few follow-up questions.

1. The issue of climate change seemed to be missing from the discussion. Why?

Jonathan:  I agree about climate change. A telling moment during the 2008 campaign – I thought – was Palin’s “drill, baby, drill” line, which seemed to represent a pivot from a conservationist approach to such issues (and one which, historically, many conservatives were sympathetic to) to an issue framed by the need for cognitive simplification.

Marc notes as well as that climate change is, assuredly, part of a bigger suite of issues that involve the rejection of science.

Me: 2. How do those of us on the non-authoritarian end of the spectrum rebrand ourselves as having the greater amount of courage because we don’t freak out in crises?

Jonathan: number 2 is a great question and I am not sure of the answer, but I will say that Ron Paul has framed his opposition to overseas adventures in terms of strength, not weakness. 

Marc notes that non-authoritarians probably do freak out during a crisis – that’s what humans do. A difference is that non-authoritarians disposition don’t seem to be freaking out all the time. After 9/11, almost everyone was in a high state of anxiety. That state receded for some, but not for others.  

Me: 3. Chapter 6 contains this passage: “Republicans seem to benefit by raising the specter of threat, especially as it relates to terrorism. In making this observation, we do not mean to suggest that this is a cynical strategy…” I recall a carpet bombing of terrorism-based political hay in the months and years following 9/11. My bias is showing, but it sure seemed to me like a cynical strategy at the time.

Jonathan: The cynicism statement was us being careful academics. Your bias is well-founded. To my comments about cynicism,

Marc adds that there was likely some real fear among GOP leaders. If you’ve read Ron Suskind’s “The One Percent Solution,” you get a sense of this. It’s probably not an either/or proposition, even if the motivation was *mostly* cynical.

Me: 4. I’ve read Nyhan and Reifler’s research into the backfire effect.

[The backfire effect occurs when people are so emotionally invested in an opinion that factual counter-evidence causes them to double-down on their misinformed stance. For example, there are some people who continue to believe there were WMDs in Iraq to justify their support of the war. All evidence to the contrary simply reinforces their anti-factual position.]

Are you familiar with this? If so, is there a relationship between high-ranking authoritarians and the backfire effect?

Jonathan: I am guessing you’d be right about the backfire event. It’s certainly consistent with what studies, in general, show about how they process information and make it conform to their worldview, though Chris Mooney has noted that progressives are not above doing this themselves (that’s not necessarily the same as non-authoritarians, but surely there’s some of that among non-authoritarians).

Me: 5. Speaking to the powerful impact of symbolism on people who rank high on the authoritarian index, I’m fascinated by how authoritarian issues play out in everyday situations. I have heard reports of people whose self-reported basis for their political opinions would place them very high on the authoritarian index.  These individuals are viscerally fearful of ethnic cuisine. It’s racist, of course, but beyond that it’s a fascinatingly powerful aversion. It’s as if they fear consuming the food of people they fear will turn them into Other. (Other being non-white, non-Christian, college educated, New York Times reading, non-heterosexual, etc.) Have you encountered similar everyday glimpses into the impact of authoritarianism?

Jonathan: Marc has actually looked at some data on the relationship between ethnic food preferences and authoritarianism and, as you might expect, there is much less desire for experimentation/trying new things among high authoritarians.

Me: 6. Where can we follow your analysis of the shenanigans leading into the presidential election?

Jonathan: I write for a few sources – I am a regular political columnist for the Independent Weekly of North Carolina – my columns come out on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month. I write pretty regularly for Huffington Post. Finally, I have started doing regular podcasts with my close friend, Marty Beller, who is the drummer for They Might be Giants. The podcast is called The drummer and the professor. It’s not just about politics, but that is a focus, and the most recent one was from Iowa, where I was covering the caucuses.

The book was genuinely fascinating, and I love the idea that there is at least one reasonable explanation for the appalling dysfunction in contemporary American politics. I highly recommend it as a primer for tracking the debates surrounding the upcoming presidential election.

An earlier version originally published at Open Salon and DTMS

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This post, American Political Dysfunction Explained, Sort-Of, originally appeared on She Thought on January 17, 2012.
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There is a strange conflict in the scientific community that revolves around some bizarre understanding of types of science and, seemingly, the scientific ego. Many people categorize some subjects of study as “hard science” and some as “soft science.” We’re talking No True Scotsman seems to have sneezed on the scientific community and people don’t seem to be inclined to wipe the fallacy boogers off. This categorization, seemingly, is to give one set of scientists a different class as another – it seems to serve the purpose of indirectly claiming that certain sciences are above others. Often times, these “soft sciences” are said to not even be sciences at all. Subjects such as psychology, sociology and anthropology are treated like the outcasts on the playground in the scientific community.

I know I’m not a scientist, at least not formally, in any of these fields, but this science elitism doesn’t make sense. It is as if, because of these conflicts, the basic ideas and definitions in science are ignored in order to serve some strange form of classicism.

I shouldn’t have to point this out, but science is a process. If people within a certain field are using that process to learn something more about a topic (no matter if it is about the physical properties of a crystallized form or if it is about operant conditioning), then it is science. Of course the beginnings of psychology were controversial and science wasn’t used to see if psychoanalysis would actually work, but we have produced studies that have proven operant conditioning to be an effective way to modify behavior. That’s right, outright manipulation by redundant stimuli (otherwise known as f***ing with people’s heads) can be a part of the scientific process. So, that means that psychoanalysis isn’t, itself, supported by science and operant conditioning is. When questions arise in other fields of science, the same type of thing holds true. Medical science showed us that the theory of humors* wasn’t valid, but that the Pathogenic Theory of Medicine has merit. Likewise, we’ve learned through science that classical thoughts on the elements were inaccurate. We haven’t dismissed Earth Science or Physics based on that, though. Instead, we used the scientific process to come up with better, more accurate (and way more awesome) ideas (to be clear, we’re talking about ideas that let us play with fire in more interesting ways and that enable us to discover adorable things like this).

I do understand that some subjects have the luxury of being more straight forward when it comes to finding answers. Since it seems easier to eliminate variables (I say “seems” because it certainly isn’t easy to eliminate variables in most theories in physics or chemistry, even), it makes it easier to develop a bias against other sciences. The environment that this creates, though, is one that says that a physicist is somehow a higher quality scientist than, say, an anthropologist. It is also one which oversimplifies topics in science, as if forensic anthropology and cultural anthropology are so closely related that on this bizarre view of science, they are both the same level of lower-tiered science than physics (and some of us like playing with dead things than trying to figure out foreign cultural dynamics, even though the latter is probably more socially helpful; the former is HARDCORE). Of course, there is probably some sort of ranking system of sciences, where the fewer the variables in a study or subject, the more accurate it probably is. That doesn’t make one thing a science or not, though.

Trying to dismiss psychology, sociology and anthropology as “soft science,” or “not real science,” is only distorting people’s understanding of what science is. It isn’t helpful to science or to teaching critical thinking skills. How can we expect the general population to understand science if we behave as if certain sciences are better than others? The reality is, the thing that makes something scientific or not is that subject’s relationship with the scientific process. If scientists who play with brains are using the scientific process, they’re as much a scientist as those who mess with people’s heads to test a theory, who are as much a scientist as those who play with different states of matter.

*Though, it is awesome that we tested something called “humorism” – we really should just revise the definition as being about the value of scientifically testing comedy or something similar. I want to see an international scale of humor invented. I’m not sure what archetypes to use to describe it, but someone must have an impressive idea out there, somewhere.

Note: I can understand dismissing sub-categories of a subject as unscientific when it is shown that using the scientific process to examine them shows them to be unsupported by evidence. Thus, dismissing psychoanalysis as unscientific might be reasonable while dismissing classical conditioning would be unreasonable.

Post Note, Note: I still love all my scientist friends, no matter which type of scientist you are.

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This post, Elitist science, originally appeared on She Thought on January 15, 2012.
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It expresses my own belief that “when the time comes” I’d like as little treatment as possible.  However, the reality, at least from the stories of my friends today, shows that end of life decision to be very complex.

My first friend is Deb.  She’s the daughter of a good friend of mine that died of cancer over 5 years ago.  I helped in the last few months with her mother, and to everyone’s horror, Deb was diagnosed with lung cancer.  You can imagine, the mother, dying of breast cancer, knowing her daughter had lung cancer.

Deb has never smoked, and only worked in hospital environments as a nurse. Lung cancer is even more difficult for people like Deb, as people assume she smoked.  We all like to take a small comfort in the thought “Well I never smoked so won’t get lung cancer”.

Link: Lung Cancer Incidence Rates High Among Women who Have Never Smoked

Up to 1 in 5 women with lung cancer have never smoked or lived with a smoker.   Deb though refuses to waste time explaining to people “No I never smoked”.  To her, cancer is the great equalizer, those suffering and battling it, all deserve compassion.  It doesn’t matter if you smoked or not, lung cancer is a horrible thing to face.  No one “deserves” it  because of a habit.

Deb decided to go on chemotherapy and experimental treatments.  She’s been through them all, or so it seems.  Pills, shots, infusions.  Some make her sick, some she barely notices.  Treating lung cancer long term means switching treatments, keeping with one until the cancer stops responding and then going on to the next.  Deb will never, ever, stop chemotherapy of some sort.  It’s taken a toll.  But her quality of life remains very good.  She works 2 jobs.  She joined weight watchers (with her doctor’s permission) and looks fabulous with her new thinner figure.  (Chemo doesn’t always make you lose weight).  She travels to Hawaii and to visit family.  Best of all she has 2 new grandchildren she never had before she was diagnosed.  They are the delight of her life.  Deciding to go the aggressive treatment route has worked out well for her.  She’ll never be cancer free, but each year she gains is another victory for science.

My other friend I ran into by accident at the food store.  I hadn’t seen Joan for many months.  I asked about her husband, and she began to tear up.  She said her husband had died, and then immediately added “We should have listened to him”.  She then went on about how her husband when diagnosed with cancer had said “I don’t want any treatment” and said he was “ready to die”.  She said her children and doctor had all convinced him to get treatment. She was almost in tears (in the dairy aisle) as she said “It was wrong of us to do that”.  Her husband suffered horribly and in the end she said it was “just one thing after another”.  I knew this was something she felt strongly about, because usual dairy aisle conversation is “oh hey, how’s it going?”

The difference perhaps between my friend Deb and my other friend’s husband is that for one science offered results and the other science offered pain and misery.  Deb’s lung cancer results are not typical.  But her taking a chance gave her years that have perhaps been the richest she has ever had.  My friend’s husband was older.  He had lived his full life.  The difference between cancer diagnosis in your early 40′s and in your late 70′s, both with poor results from chemotherapy, is that in your early 40′s you aren’t even thinking about death.  In your late 70′s you’ve at least thought about it some.

Deb made her choice by herself.  Her family had input but from the start she was ready to fight the cancer.  My friend’s husband had to be talked into it.  He was fine with just pain killers and quiet time with family before he died.  I know a lot of older friends that would choose full throttle chemotherapy, and some younger ones that might not want the endless regimen of chemotherapy Deb goes through.

No matter what, fighting cancer is very difficult for both the cancer patient and the family and friends.   Life, and death, doesn’t always give us clear choices.

I think in the end, how one chooses to battle an illness needs to be a personal choice.  My hope is that those choices are respected and supported.

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This post, A Tale of Two Treatments, originally appeared on She Thought on January 13, 2012.
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–Benjamin Franklin

I was recently and publicly called a “fat hater” on Facebook by someone I know. It was in response to an article I wrote for Discovery News about a rhyming children’s book for 4 to 8 year olds called Maggie Goes On a Diet.  The article was about a controversy surrounding the book, in which an overweight 14-year-old girl loses weight and gains self-esteem through diet and exercise. Outraged critics were concerned that the book could harm children, and I interviewed one expert (and quoted another) who claimed the book was damaging. I also analyzed their criticisms, and pointed out several logical errors and mistaken assumptions that critics were making about the book (for example that the diet Maggie goes on is an unhealthy, calorie-restricted diet, and that the book was likely to have a significant influence on children or their diets).

I spent about half a day researching and writing the column, and the final product provided a much deeper level of analysis and critical thinking than most of the other news stories on the topic (do a Google search for the topic and see for yourself). Many Discovery News readers agreed with my analysis.

Yet others dismissed my piece—not because my facts or arguments were wrong, but because it was just another example of my well-known “fat hating” bias. My article could be safely ignored and dismissed (or perhaps not even read) because anything I wrote was clearly driven by an anti-fat ulterior agenda. I would have welcomed some substantive criticism or comments explaining where my logic or arguments were faulty, but none were offered.

This is, of course, a version of the logical fallacy of the ad hominem attack: Criticizing the person, not the argument or claim. We see it all the time in skepticism; it’s nothing new. But when a colleague and ostensible critical thinker does it, it’s disheartening.

I should confess that I have also been publicly accused of hating both gays and dwarves. No, I’m not making this up. Interestingly, as far as I know I’ve never been accused of hating (or bias against) Blacks, Jews, Asians, or Muslims. Then again, the week’s not over.

As it happens, I am not at all shy about identifying targets of my hatred; George W. Bush and psychics who exploit grieving families pretty much complete the list. If I hate you, I’ll make that perfectly clear; you won’t need to read between the lines. But gays, dwarves, and fat people (not to mention fat gay dwarves) are fine by me. The claim that I hate gays would surely come as a surprise to my many lifelong gay friends, including James Randi, to whom I dedicated one of my books. And the idea that I hate overweight people would also surely come as a shock to nearly all of my ex-girlfriends, few of whom are svelte.

A few years ago, I even lost a friend who refused to speak to me because I had written an article that included a discussion of false rape claims. She (apparently) badly misread the piece and somehow concluded that I was suggesting that real rapes don’t occur, or that real victims shouldn’t be believed. I of course wrote no such thing. On very rare occasions I’ve even heard the suggestion that I am somehow biased in favor of sex offenders (whatever that means) because I have written about the sex predator panic scares, explaining to parents that family and friends pose a far greater danger to children than any convicted sex offender. In fact a child is far more likely to be physically or sexually abused, abducted, or even killed by his or her parents than a sex offender stranger. This is a well-established statistical fact, and how that could be interpreted as a bias toward sex offenders is beyond me.

I am used to attacks and criticism; it comes with the territory. Any time you are challenging someone’s beliefs or claims, and especially when you do with references, sound arguments, and sources, people get upset. In my twelve years of doing skeptical investigations and science literacy work, I’ve been threatened with both violence and lawsuits (including from a New York Times reporter—involving a predator panic piece I wrote, in fact). I get hate mail of some sort nearly every week; I’m told that I’m stupid, willfully ignorant, and an embarrassment to journalism. Some people leave comments on Discovery News articles saying I should be fired. I think writing is the only profession where people who have read a few paragraphs of your work feel entitled to tell you what a horrible, incompetent person you are, and on a fairly regular basis.

I don’t mind the criticisms, it’s the bias accusations that annoy me, and it’s instructive to briefly analyze them. When I question claims about aliens and UFO photographs, critics assert that the only logical reason I would do so is because I have a bias or agenda as part of a government conspiracy to keep the truth from the public. When I question claims about alternative medicine and homeopathy, it’s not because I have researched it and know a lot about it, but because I’m being paid by Big Pharma. When I question claims made by psychics, critics say it’s because I have a bias toward protecting the scientific status quo—or that if I were to accept the reality of psychics it would devastate my worldview. And when I question claims about the links between media images and eating disorders, it can’t be because I know something about it—having studied it for years and written a book about the mass media—but because I hate fat people.

All of these folks have one thing in common: The assumption that the reason I’m criticizing their claims or arguments because 1) I haven’t done adequate research into the subject, and if I did, I’d realize that they were right; and 2) I have a hidden agenda, some bias or ulterior motive that compels me to write my ill-informed rubbish despite all the obvious evidence against my position.

Often the basic logic goes something like this: “You are saying something that’s different than what I heard (or believe), so you must be wrong.” It rarely seems to occur to them that maybe what they heard (or believe) might be wrong, and that the author who has spent hours (or days or years) researching it might know more about it. Truly open-minded people who are willing to listen and consider information and arguments that contradict their beliefs are discouragingly rare.

Many of these accusations of bias and hatred would of course not happen if I stuck to safe, non-controversial claims (among skeptics, anyway). If I restricted my critical analyses to UFOs or Bigfoot or psychic claims, I would only garner criticisms and attacks from the believers (and there’s plenty of those). My friends and fans, skeptics and otherwise, are happy to have me fight the good fight against woo, pseudoscience, and New Age bullshit day in and day out, month after month, year after year.

But some of them get very uncomfortable when I write and discuss topics that touch a nerve, especially issues about gender or sexuality (religion, as you might expect, isn’t really a point of contention among this crowd). Things get a little awkward when I question whether or not, for example, the “It Gets Better” anti-bullying campaign actually had any effect, or whether the “epidemic” of gay teen suicides last year was real. Things get a little awkward when I question whether sex offender notification laws are useful, whether false rape claims are a problem, or whether fashion models and a rhyming kid’s book actually lead to anorexia.

I apply my skepticism across the board, asking for evidence behind any and all claims. I don’t like it when people whose ideas and policies I oppose lie and repeat false statements to make their points, and I don’t like it when people whose ideas and policies I agree with lie and repeat false statements to make their points. I try hard not to be selectively skeptical. I believe that there should be no sacred cows, no taboo topics.

I will continue to write about body image and sex offenders and bad statistics and faulty arguments wherever I encounter them. I will endure the barbs and personal attacks, because I believe that these things should be openly discussed, and the arguments, pro and con, should be carefully analyzed instead of ignored or dismissed because of some perceived bias. Truth is best served when everyone asks, “What is the evidence?” not only for claims and ideas they oppose, but also for those they support. The principles of free speech are not tested by popular speech, but by unpopular speech. In the same vein, the true nature of open and skeptical inquiry is not tested when a person says something we agree with, but in how we react when a person says something we disagree with.

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This post, Hate, Bias, and Skeptical Inquiry, originally appeared on She Thought on October 9, 2011.
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Jennifer Hancock, from her website

Jen Hancock was kind enough to reach out to the SheThought writers and offered me a chance to read and review her book, The Humanist Approach to Happiness: Practical Wisdom. The book is aimed at teens and young adults as a way to teach ethics, critical thinking skills and decision-making to young people. If you’re more interested in the book than anything I have to say, just scroll to the end and there’s more information on the special deal she’s offering SheThought readers.

This is perfect for me because, as someone who automatically hates everything and thinks grown-ups are stupid, I am exactly the right audience for a book aimed at teenagers.

So I suppose that’s a good place to start. I didn’t totally hate it, but I didn’t love it either. Some parts of it were really good, and some parts really rankled. It is written in an easy to understand way with plenty of examples and metaphors that are appropriate to a younger readership. The writer clearly has a very keen memory of her teenage days and isn’t afraid to mine them for engaging examples.

One of my bigger problems with the book came from formatting choices. There seemed to be some errors with the margins, which is fairly minor, but the author also made the decision to pepper the book with quotations from famous speakers. Now, I’m not against quotations, but giant quotations in between connected paragraphs makes me feel a little bit off kilter. When the quotes intrude, I feel the need either to read the quote and then re-figure out what I was reading or to skip the quote entirely.

There’s a lot of great stuff, however, on what makes people “good” people, and what makes people not so good. Her three required traits are compassion, ethics, and responsibility, and these seem pretty accurate to me. She’s also happy to list bad people as well, people who generally don’t follow those three guidelines. She’s neither pro or anti-religion, at least not explicitly, and simply says that people can be good or bad regardless of faith and the only real caveat she gives in the book is that if you or someone you know is grieving, don’t assume your faith is the way they want to deal with grief. And be skeptical about supernatural claims, because that stuff is ridiculous and can get you killed!

My favorite part is where she insists that everyone is a dork. Because we all are dorks, and the sooner we embrace it, the sooner we can move beyond lame attempts at being cool. She also thinks we should be more eager to engage in lifelong learning and learning from our elders. Amen to that. We are all dorks who should hang out with old dorks.

And then she starts wandering a bit away from things I agree with into territory I feel a little confused about. She insists that people should aim for simplicity generally, including in their diet. Now, I’m all for simple tastes and simple lifestyles, but I am always skeptical about diet claims of any kind. Insisting on food simplicity strikes me as faddish and there are no references that make it seem like she’s making scientific claims, just personal ones. Why is a drink with chemicals worse than a drink with no chemicals? Am I really to believe that natural means healthy? I mean, arsenic is natural.

And she goes on to really discourage people from indulging in “sinful” pleasures (her quotes). Now, I appreciate that a book aimed at a young audience isn’t going to say go try drugs and sex and rock and roll because they’re interesting and part of the human experience… except that’s exactly what I think it should say. This is clearly just a difference of opinion between the author and myself, but I feel a little confused as to how her view is the only one justified by humanism, though perhaps it isn’t trying to claim to be the only point-of-view.

And then there’s sex. The author and I are clearly coming from totally different worlds on this one. Her advice to play the field while dating and wait for sex are things that I don’t personally find compelling, but I don’t think it’s necessarily bad advice. But when she says things like women who hate their dads transfer that hate to all men; and people who dated can’t really be friends and shouldn’t contact one another for at least a year; and, no matter what they say, women who say they’re OK with a solely sexual relationship are really just looking for an emotional relationship, whether they know it or not; and people who watch porn lose sense of reality and it’s a catalyst for bizarre violent activity and it’s addictive… when she says things like that, it is all I can do not to punch the screen. Where are the citations? Why on earth does she think this stuff?

The book ends, however, on a high note, in a sense, about grieving. This is the best part of the book and speaks from personal experience and love. I’ve never seen much literature on the humanist perspective on grief, and this handles it gracefully.

So, there are good and bad bits and, if you rip out the section on relationships and sex, I think the book is a great read for young adults. I think few adult readers would find it challenging, but there are still some enlightening moments to it.

More information from the author:
Even though the book is explicitly Humanist, I’m finding that moms of different stripes and interestingly enough, religious folk who work with teens, are interested in the book.  My book is currently in the curricula for the Royal Military College of Canada to teach cadets critical thinking and decision-making skills. It’s also going to be in the new curricula for the UUA for youth education in the areas of critical thinking and character development.  Oh, and it’s enjoying its third month atop the Kindle best seller lists for Parenting/Morals&Responsibility and Parenting/Teens.

For a copy of the book go to: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/22621  20% off both the ebook and the paperback formats, Coupon code: UT36F – Price will be $4.80 instead of $6.00 – this coupon expires Oct 1st 2012.

For the paperback go to: https://www.createspace.com/3463716 and use the discount code: 2SV7A43M  20% off the list of $12.98 - so the price will be $10.38

The book is also available at whatever online book retailer you might prefer to use.

PS – I’ve also got a new little e-book out – Jen Hancock’s Handy Humanism Handbook – I’m giving that away free to people who sign up for my email list and the Humanist of Florida Association are giving it away free to anyone who donates to them or becomes a member.

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This post, Book Review: Jen Hancock’s Humanist Approach to Happiness, originally appeared on She Thought on September 28, 2011.
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This afternoon I attended the volunteer luncheon at the hotel buffet. No, I didn’t crash it, I’m volunteering as a ticket taker for several hours tomorrow. There was an air of fun and frivolity as friends noticed each other in person and “touched each other for real, not on a computer screen,”  as Jennifer Michael Hecht noted.

At TAM you get to meet all sorts of people in real life, not just Twitter peeps. But don’t take my word for it, here’s a few shots of James Randi performing slight of hand conjuring at the lunch table.

This entry is cross-posted at Skeptical Humanities.

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This post, Amaz!ng Sights at the TAM Pre-Show, originally appeared on She Thought on July 13, 2011.
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This week I’ll be attending The Amaz!ng Meeting 9 (TAM9) in Las Vegas, Nevada, along with many of my SheThought co-writers. TAM9 is the annual conference of The James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) that brings together skeptics and critical thinkers for several days of talks, panels and myriad activities. Each year TAM gets bigger and bigger whilst expanding content, diversity and attendance.

This year’s schedule contains two keynote addresses that are open to the general public. The first is given by Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of Nova ScienceNow and director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. Dr. Tyson brings a passion for astrophysics and a strong, persuasive message of the necessity for science education and communication to the general public. The second keynote is Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, prolific bestselling author and director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. Dawkins is a foremost speaker on the importance of evidence-based thought in science and public life. He has the distinction of being perhaps the world’s best known public atheist.

The rest of the TAM9 schedule is the most varied and diverse yet. Included are artists, poets, scientists, activists, journalists and television personalities. The full schedule is here. The program covers immense ground in critical thinking, from Phil Plait to Jennifer Michael Hecht to Carol Tavris to Sarah Mayhew to Bill Nye to Adam Savage to Elizabeth Loftus to Skepchick bloggers to the hosts of MonsterTalk, and many, many more. The schedule is full and appeals to a wide variety of skeptics, not just serious scientists and intense science enthusiasts. This program emphasizes critical thinking for people across disciplines.

Beyond the official TAM program, there’s a full slate of fringe events which emphasize the diversity that TAM represents this year. Side trips are planned to Red Rocks and the Grand Canyon as well as daredevil activities. There are meetups for myriad subgroups, including various nationalities, vegetarians, LGBT folks and others. The most notorious of the unofficial events is Penn Jillette’s Bacon and Donut Party, which is a fundraiser for JREF.

The diversity of the official and non-official schedules of TAM9 elucidates the changing face of skepticism. No longer are cries of the skeptical movement as a bastion of privileged white men accurate or productive. This year’s Amaz!ng Meeting holds promise to be one that moves beyond talk of inclusion into one of outreach.

TAM9 will be held at the South Point Hotel, Casino and Spa from July 14-17. I will be posting daily blog updates from Las Vegas throughout the conference. If you have any particular questions for interviewees or issues you’d like me to address, please leave me a comment here or through Twitter.

This entry is cross-posted at Skeptical Humanities.

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This post, SheThought Happens in Vegas, originally appeared on She Thought on July 10, 2011.
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I’m not even going to pretend that you care about my opinion on the Rebecca Watson/Elevator Guy/Stef McGraw debacle. If you feel that Rebecca did not have a right to feel uncomfortable or speak out about it, then you should go read Greg Laden and John Rennie, while I weep for your soul.

I have been particularly troubled by the suggestion that female anxiety over being in an elevator alone with a strange man late at night is of a piece with the anxiety of a white person who finds themselves at an urban bus stop surrounded by black people and then approached by one. The suggestion is that the anxiety felt is the product of negative stereotypes. J. Earl Davis makes some good points in his article on this issue, but this comparison is not one of them. All analogies eventually break down. This one does not even get out of the starting gate.

In both cases, we have a pretty simple set-up. We have a person from one category* (female in one, white in the other) being approached by a person from another category (male, black). The category of the approaching person is the basis of anxiety. Here is the important difference. What happens to the risk if you switch the category of the approaching person? Making this change might alleviate the feeling of anxiety. In the bus stop situation, it is really unlikely to change the actual risk of being mugged. In the elevator situation, the actual risk of sexual assault drops significantly.

Males commit the vast, vast majority of sexual assaults. And, there are quite a few sexual assaults. Unless you are proposing that most of these assaults are the product of a relatively small number of prolific, serial perverts, then this means that quite a few members of the External Genitalia Club have or will have committed a sexual assault. Where would you draw the line at which it gets ok to be nervous? One in twenty guys? One in ten? One in four? Of course, not every guy who is willing to commit a sexual assault does at every opportunity, but the knowledge that a substantial fraction of males are willing to cross that line represents a significant risk.

It gets worse. Given the common understanding that sexual assaults are under-reported, it is both a rational response and a risk averse human response to assume that the risk is far greater than the statistics would suggest. Our culture of victim blaming, shaming, and silencing is what gets well-meaning nice guys treated like threats, not hypersensitivity.

I don’t know if there is some philosophical, formal difference in kind between the bus stop racism and the perception of men as potential threats, but the difference in degree is so vast that I’m perfectly willing to operate as if there is. Not that anything I have said here is of any real value. Are we seriously debating whether or not a human being’s feeling of discomfort is rational enough to be legitimate? Discomfort is a feeling. You feel it. You don’t decide to feel it. You don’t do a cost-benefit analysis. While not “all” women agree with Rebecca, many do. Maybe we should consider that certain behaviors make a considerable fraction of other people uncomfortable, try to avoid those behaviors, and leave it at that.

*It should also be noted that while the biological categories of sex actually exist, there is no good evidence that race does.

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This post, Legitimate Anxiety, originally appeared on She Thought on July 8, 2011.
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In fact, this event is so legendary that I believe it is appropriate to use it like a morality play. In any group situation, we need to ask ourselves, “Am I Feynman or am I the ‘blue-ribbon’ panel?”*.

How do you know which role you are playing? Groupthink researchers have helpfully developed some diagnostic tools just for that purpose. According to the founder of groupthink research, Irving Janis, the conditions that lead to groupthink are:

1. High group cohesiveness

2. Structural faults

• insulation of the group
• lack of impartial leadership
• lack of norms requiring methodological procedures
• homogeneity of members’ social backgrounds and ideology

3. Situational context:

• highly stressful external threats
• recent failures
• excessive difficulties on the decision-making task
• moral dilemmas

- quoted from Groupthink article at Wikipedia

And, the diagnostic symptoms of Groupthink are:

Type I: Overestimations of the group—its power and morality

1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.

Type II: Closed-mindedness

1. Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
2. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, impotent, or stupid.

Type III: Pressures toward uniformity

1. Self-censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
2. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
3. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”
4. Mind guards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

- quoted from Groupthink article at Wikipedia

*There is a right answer to this question.

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This post, Groupthink and The Feynman Morality Play, originally appeared on She Thought on July 2, 2011.
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Speaker Liz Lutgendorff

I recently traveled to the British seaside town of Blackpool to speak at a paranormal conference about being a skeptical paranormal researcher. As scary as it was to speak in front of a large crowd of those who disagree with me, the saddest thing about the whole experience for me was the fact that I was the 2nd female speaker the conference has had in a whole decade of conferences.

Ten years, two women.

It’s hard to comprehend really and it saddens me that it’s an experience I’ve had time and time again. We often see people talking and blogging about how women are not fairly represented at conferences. The last conference I spoke at was the QED conference in Manchester, England, and women were fairly represented there which was fantastic to see and it shows that if you look in the right places and you try hard enough you really can find women who are happy to talk at your event.

Which is why I’ve set up the ‘She Talks!’ register for women in the UK to sign up to if they are willing to speak about their area on expertise at conferences and other such engagements. It seemed that so many conference organisers were saying they wanted to have more women speaking at their events but they simply couldn’t find them – so it seemed logical to create a register where they can do so. It was inspired by the ‘No Chicks, no Excuses’ site set up by Leslie Cannold,  Jane Caro and Catherine Deveny.

I saw a problem and I saw a way in which I could try and solve the problem, or at least make a small change to the problem, and I am trying to make it work.

Speaker Alice Sheppard

I’ve had opposition already (and the site is barely a day old) from people stating that the register is positive discrimination as it is harrassing conference organisers into inviting female speakers to their events, which means the female speaker is more likely to be at the event based on their gender and not their merit, thus, they’ll be the ‘token woman’.

This simply isn’t what ‘She Talks!’ is designed for and it isn’t what it will achieve, because the register is there to eradicate the problems that conference organisers claim they are having when it comes to finding women to talk at their events. The register was made to show conference organisers that they don’t have to have a female speaker just because she is female, but that there are plenty of women available to speak at their event who could do so because of their work, their research, their merit…

If you are based in the UK, or you travel here and are willing to speak about your area of expertise then please consider adding yourself to the register. I hope it can make a small difference, and who knows, maybe small differences like these will encourage a big difference in the long run…

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This post, She Talks!, originally appeared on She Thought on June 16, 2011.
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