My thesis with regard to sex differences is quite moderate, in that I do not discount environmental factors; I'm just saying, don't forget about biology. To me that sounds very moderate. But for some people in the field of gender studies, even that is too extreme. They want it to be all environment and no biology. You can understand that politically that was an important position in the 1960s, in an effort to try to change society. But is it a true description, scientifically, of what goes on? It's time to distinguish politics and science, and just look at the evidence.

Introduction by John Brockman

Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. In this Edge feature, he presents his new Assortative Mating Theory which connects his two fields of research: the characteristics of autism in terms of understanding what's going on in the brain and the causes of the condition; and understanding the differences between males and females.

"My new theory is that it's not just a genetic condition," he says, "but it might be the result of two particular types of parents, who are both contributing genes. This might be controversially received. This is because there are a number of different theories out there — one of which is an environmental theory, such as autism being caused by vaccine damage — the MMR vaccine (the measles, mumps, and rubella combination vaccine). Another environmental theory is that autism is due to toxic levels of mercury building up in the child's brain. But the genetic theory has a lot of evidence, and what we are now testing is that if two "systemizers" have a child, this will increase the risk of the child having autism. That's it in a nutshell.

Baron-Cohen realizes that his theory might raise anxieties. "Just because it's potentially controversial," he says, "doesn't mean that we shouldn't investigate it. And there are ways that you can investigate it empirically."

He also expects controversy. Given the continuing public discussing in the US about innate sex differences, he will, no doubt, be challenged when he says "It was interesting for me to discover that there's been a sleight of hand, mostly in the States, such that the word 'sex' has been replaced by the word 'gender'. Baron-Cohen believes that it's time "to distinguish politics and science, and just look at the evidence". Others will feel differently.

— JB

SIMON BARON-COHEN is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His books include Mindblindness; and The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain.

SIMON BARON-COHEN's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Marc D. Hauser, Steven Pinker, Armand Leroi, Carole Hooven, Elizabeth Spelke, Alison Gopnik, David C. Geary, Helena Cronin, Linda S. Gottfredson. NEW Baron-Cohen responds.

When you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together, it creates an evil barrel. You could put virtually anybody in it and you're going to get this kind of evil behavior. The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That's the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that's the wrong analysis. It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that 'little shop of horrors.'

Introduction

"When you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together, it creates an evil barrel,"writes the eminent situationist psychologist Philip Zimbardo, known for his famous Stanford Prison Experiment in the early 70s.

"You could put virtually anybody in it and you're going to get this kind of evil behavior," he continued. "The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That's the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that's the wrong analysis. It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that 'little shop of horrors.'"

About 30 years ago, Zimbardo and his colleagues began to do research on dehumanization. "What are the ways in which, instead of changing yourself and becoming the aggressor, it becomes easier to be hostile against other people by changing your psychological conception of them?". he asked. "You think of them as worthless animals. That's the killing power of stereotypes."

He connected that work the work he had done during the Stanford prison experiment. "The question there was," he says, "what happens when you put good people in an evil place? We put good, ordinary college students in a very realistic, prison-like setting in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford. We dehumanized the prisoners, gave them numbers, and took away their identity. We also deindividuated the guards, calling them Mr. Correctional Officer, putting them in khaki uniforms, and giving them silver reflecting sunglasses like in the movie Cool Hand Luke. Essentially, we translated the anonymity ofLord of the Flies into a setting where we could observe exactly what happened from moment to moment."

He found in that experiment that it is "really a study of the competition between institutional power versus the individual will to resist. The companion piece is the study by Stanley Milgram, who was my classmate at James Monroe High School in the Bronx. (Again, it is interesting that we are two situationists who came from the same neighborhood.) His study investigated the power of an individual authority: Some guy in a white lab coat tells you to continue to shock another person even though he's screaming and yelling. That's one way that evil is created as blind obedience to authority. But more often than not, somebody doesn't have to tell you to do something. You're just in a setting where you look around and everyone else is doing it. Say you're a guard and you don't want to harm the prisoners—because at some level you know they're just college students—but the two other guards on your shift are doing terrible things. They provide social models for you to follow if you are going to be a team player."

-JB

PHILIP ZIMBARDO is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. He is a founder of the National Center for the Psychology of Terrorism, and creator and co-director of The Shyness Clinic.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO's Edge Bio Page

The problem lies in how we imagine our future hedonic states. We are the only animals that can peer deeply into our futures—the only animal that can travel mentally through time, preview a variety of futures, and choose the one that will bring us the greatest pleasure and/or the least pain. This is a remarkable adaptation—which, incidentally, is directly tied to the evolution of the frontal lobe—because it means that we can learn from mistakes before we make them. We don't have to actually have gallbladder surgery or lounge around on a Caribbean beach to know that one of these is better than another. We may do this better than any other animal, but our research suggests that we don't do it perfectly. Our ability to simulate the future and to forecast our hedonic reactions to it is seriously flawed, and that people are rarely as happy or unhappy as they expect to be.

Introduction by John Brockman

In 1968, I was sitting at the back of a seedy Sunset Strip night club in Hollywood having a few drinks a friend, an actor, who, in the blink of an eye, had unexpectedly become an overnight sensation. An actor's actor, highly regarded by his peers, he was now in the middle of the actor's dream fantasy...on the covers of national news magazines, women, acclaim, and...work.

Or was it an actor's nightmare?

" The big wombassa", he said quitely.

"What?", I asked. "The big what?"

"It's 'the big wombassa' ", Johnny, "what you think you're going to get, and what you don't get, when you get what you want."

~~~

The Big Wombassa.

Indeed, over the years I've thought a lot about this highly intuitive formulation but it wasn't until I met Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert that I found out that syndromes such as "The Big Wombassa" had become a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry, and at no less a place than Harvard's Social Cognition and Emotion Lab, which is bringing scientific rigor to the study of subjective experiences such as satisfaction and happiness.

Gilbert is well-known for his work on what he and his long-time collaborator, Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia, call "affective forecasting", which is "the ability to predict one's hedonic reactions to future events."

He points out that "many economists believe that affective forecasting errors are impediments to rational action and hence should be eliminated—just as we would all agree that illiteracy or innumeracy are bad things that deserve to be eradicated. But cognitive errors may be more like optical illusions than they are like illiteracy. The human visual system is susceptible to a variety of optical illusions, but if someone offered to surgically restructure your eyes and your visual cortex so that parallel lines no longer appeared to converge on the horizon, you should run as far and fast as possible."

Gilbert approaches these issues as a scientist, not a clinician. He is "interested in learning how people can become better affective forecasters, but not because I believe that people should become better affective forecasters. My job as a scientist is to find and explain these errors and illusions, and it is up to each individual to decide how they want to use our findings."

— JB

DANIEL GILBERT is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

Daniel Gilbert's Edge Bio Page

In the domain of bodies, most of us accept that common sense is wrong. We concede that apparently solid objects are actually mostly empty space, consisting of tiny particles and fields of energy. Perhaps the same sort of reconciliation will happen in the domain of souls, and it will come to be broadly recognized that our dualist belief system, though intuitively appealing, is factually mistaken. Perhaps we will all come to agree with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and join the side of the "brights": those who reject the supernatural and endorse the world-view established by science.

But I am skeptical. The notion that our souls are flesh is profoundly troubling to many, as it clashes with religion. Dualism and religion are not the same: You can be dualist without holding any other religious beliefs, and you can hold religious beliefs without being dualist. But they almost always go together. And some very popular religious views rest on a dualist foundation, such as the belief that people survive the destruction of their bodies. If you give up on dualism, this is what you lose.

This is not small potatoes.

Introduction

As a teenager, Paul Bloom worked extensively with autistic children, and when he majored in psychology at McGill University, he expected to end up as a clinical child psychologist. His interests shifted when he met John Macnamara, a professor who studied the interface between psychology and philosophy. Bloom worked with Macnamara as an undergraduate, and then did his graduate work at MIT with Susan Carey, on cognitive development and language acquisition.

As a professor—first at University of Arizona, and then at Yale—Bloom explores how children learn the meanings of words, and he developed a theory of word learning that has social cognition (also known as "theory of mind" or "mindreading") at its core. More recently, Bloom and his students have started to explore a set of related puzzles having to do with the nature and development of art, religion, humor, and morality.

PAUL BLOOM is a professor of psychology at Yale University who works on language and development, and with Steven Pinker coauthored one of the seminal papers in the field. He is co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences and the author of several books, the most recent of which is Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human.

Paul Bloom's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Responses by Jesse Bering, Marvin Minsky, Jaron Lanier, Paul Harris, Pascal Boyer, Paul Bloom replies; Mark Mirsky

Introduction

Psychologist John Gottman's goal is "to be like the guy who invented Velcro. Nobody remembers his name, but everybody uses Velcro". He is a psychologist who looks at relationships and focus on the interaction, the "fleeting architectural fluid form that people are creating as they talk to each other, as they smile, as they move."

At Gottman's "Love Lab" he conducts empirical research projects that study human nature scientifically. He follows up his empirical research of interviews, physiological measurements, observations, and creates mathematical models that provide theoretical understanding of all these processes.

Gottman, trained as a mathematician, has been influenced by the field of psycho-physiology, which is concerned with "the study of the body and the face and voice and emotion in relationships, and just try to understand the naturalistic development of relationships. How do people respond emotionally to one another?" He's made his own contribution to this field of emotion with his concept of "met-emotion," or "how people feel about feelings, what their history is with specific emotions like pride, respect or disrespect, love, fear, anger, sadness".

He is looking for nothing less than the universality in relationships. We are as social as bees, he points out, and "Von Frisch discovered the language of bees by going right to the hive and watching them dance. So we will discover the human dance."

So far, his surmise is that "respect and affection are essential to all relationships working and contempt destroys them. It may differ from culture to culture how to communicate respect, and how to communicate affection, and how not to do it, but I think we'll find that those are universal things".

—JB

The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it's unlikely there'll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it's impossible that there'll be a pharmacology of meaning.

Introduction

Clinical psychology, social psychology has, in our lifetimes, been able to relieve an enormous amount of suffering, notes Martin Seligman. "Can psychologists can make people lastingly happier?," he asks.

"We are able to look at the causal skein of mental illness and unravel it, either by longitudinal studies — the same people over time — or experimental studies, which would get rid of third variables...We're able to create treatments — drugs, psychotherapy — and do random assignment placebo control studies to find out which ones really worked and which ones were inert." But, he notes that one result of this success is that 90% of the science in psychology is now based on the disease model, and this has resulted in three costs:

"The first one was moral, that we became victimologists and pathologizers. Our view of human nature was that mental illness fell on you like a ton of bricks, and we forgot about notions like choice, responsibility, preference, will, character, and the like. The second cost was that by working only on mental illness we forgot about making the lives of relatively untroubled people happier, more productive, and more fulfilling. And we completely forgot about genius, which became a dirty word. The third cost was that because we were trying to undo pathology we didn't develop interventions to make people happier; we developed interventions to make people less miserable."

Since 1996, Seligman, the Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at UPenn, has been President of the American Psychological Association. His aim for the coming years is that "we will be able to make the parallel claim about happiness; that is, in the same way I can claim unblushingly that psychology and psychiatry have decreased the tonnage of suffering in the world, my aim is that psychology and maybe psychiatry will increase the tonnage of happiness in the world."

Central to Seligman's positive psychology is "eudaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean smiling a lot and giggling. Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. Aristotle is not talking about raw feeling, about thrills, about orgasms. Aristotle is talking about what Mike Csikszentmihalyi works on, and that is, when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music."

"The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more — recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you're best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life."

—JB

MARTIN E.P. SELIGMAN, Ph.D., works on learned helplessness, depression, and on optimism and pessimism. He is currently Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is well known in academic and clinical circles and is a best-selling author.

His bibliography includes twenty books and 200 articles on motivation and personality. Among his better-known works are Learned Optimism; The Optimistic Child; Helplessness; Abnormal Psychology, and Authentic Happiness.

In 1996 Dr. Seligman was elected President of the American Psychological Association.

Martin Seligman's Edge Bio Page

Introduction

Gary Marcus is a young research psychologist whose interest in the literature of biology and resulted in new and interesting ideas about the biological basis of mind. He believes that "the mechanisms that build our brains are just a special case of the mechanisms that build the rest of our body. The initial structure of the mind, like the initial structure of the rest of the body, is a product of our genes."

His goal is twofold: (a) "to track closely the progress in genetics, and try to think about the question of how a tiny number of genes can lead you from an ancestral chimpanzee view of the world to a human view of the world"; and (b) "to rethink linguistics as a question of adapting from primate systems that are already in place. Instead of assuming that everything about language is sui generis—independent of the rest of the cognitive system—or the opposite extreme, which the anti-nativists might assume—that there's nothing special about language—I'm assuming there's something special about language, but that it's a variation on a theme."

Noam Chomsky appreciates Marcus's "wonderful contribution to our understanding of the biological basis for higher mental processes." Steven Pinker notes his "new ideas for how to integrate what we know about the thinking, talking person". Howard Gardner reads him for an understanding of the "space between genes and the mind". Read on....

—JB

GARY F. MARCUS is Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology at New York University and Director of the NYU Infant Language Center. His research on language acquisition and computational modeling has been published in journals such as Science, Cognition, and Cognitive Psychology. He is the author of The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science and The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought.

Gary Marcus's Edge Bio Page