The Surprising Power of Virtue Labeling
nautil.us
nautil.us
There's a pattern parents are supposed to follow now. When a child does something undesirable, you criticise the individual action. When they do something desirable, you praise the overall quality.
Eg - Child attempts to pull glass off table. Instead of calling them naughty or careless, we explain to them that doing things that could break glass is dangerous to them and the people around.
When a child picks up their toys and puts them back where they belong, we say "thank you for being so helpful", or "thank you for being so neat".
At least anecdotally, calling children mischievous tends to have this kind of reinforcement on them where they then start to adopt the label of being mischievous.
Admittedly, I don't know if it's just confirmation bias. It could be me thinking of their behaviour differently by avoiding any labels in my head too.
As they grow older and understand more complex concepts you can start to educate them on the nuances and reasons but in my experience, they will automatically start asking you at the right age and you should be able to just use that as your trajectory IMO.
Most young humans don't misbehave. It's their job to explore the world, test boundaries, learn. It's the parent's job to preserve the boundaries. Reassure the child the world is safe and predictable. Stuff like bed time rituals are super important to keeping everyone sane.
Ages 0-8, imprint your child with your values. Ages 9-12, have fun together. Ages 13-25, keep them alive.
Cognition is social. We resonate off each other. Model the behavior you expect, your kids will pick it up.
This sounds normal to a lot of people but in New York it's not that normal. How they will turn out we will see :)
At first, it was just help by "washing" the vegetables. What kid doesn't like to play in the water?
He'd eat anything he helped prepare, even if he didn't like it much (eg mushrooms). Because he had a relationship with his food.
Now he's quite the foodie. Makes serviceable Phad Thai, curries, etc.
Another house rule was "One 'No thank you' bite". I didn't make any of the kids choke down foods, like my parents did to us. But they had to try everything at least once. They were often happily surprised.
Also, my boys get to decide what to eat once a month and help to do it. Ther is just one rule. They can't choose the same which means we got the burgers, lasagne, pasta with butter and parmesan and curry chicken out of the way fast :)
Anecdotally, as the parent of a not-quite-2-year-old, I have found that when I treat 2- to 4-year-old kids at the playground with basic human respect, and pay attention to their interests and feelings, they end up following me all around subsequently (and e.g. running over to me when they see me the next week, wanting to show me their toys and tricks, ...), as if they were craving non-controlling non-judgmental human interaction they otherwise were not receiving from other people they interact with on a regular basis.
Watching other parents and caretakers, there are a substantial proportion who constantly deny kids’ feelings, tell them what they are supposed to feel and think, baby them by doing things for them that they could do for themselves, prevent them from doing not-very-risky things ostensibly for safety reasons, pointlessly force them to do irrelevant things they don’t want to do, etc.
YMMV.
With regards to the feelings. It's not as simple as you seem to portray. Kids will use that to get things their way there are plenty examples of parents who accept all their kid's emotions at face value and end up running around being controlled by their kids.
So a balance is needed.
And yes I agree that they should do as many things themselves which also for our kids means getting a lot of bruises for falling down from things (within reason obviously)
It's all about balance. Don't deny your kid their emotions when they are real but "call them on their bluff" when they are not. That's my approach at least.
You might be surprised. Even when kids don’t fully understand the explanation, they can understand tone of voice, and might still appreciate that the adult has reasons for acting and is trying to explain instead of making decisions capriciously. The act of explaining also forces the adult to think about the reasons for their decisions, which gives a chance for reconsideration when the decision was in fact arbitrary. Finally, explaining things gets both parties in the habit of talking about their feelings and decisions instead of expecting everyone around to guess them and then getting mad when they are not understood.
(For a simple example, if we just read the same book 3 times in a row, and I want to read something else, I can either (a) explain that I am bored with the book and need some variety to keep my sanity, and let the kid pick the next book, or (b) realize that I don’t actually care which book we are reading, and just dive in for time #4; either of those is better than just “we aren’t reading that book again, we are reading this one” which is just a unilateral decision.)
> With regards to the feelings. It's not as simple as you seem to portray. Kids will use that to get things their way there are plenty examples of parents who accept all their kid's emotions at face value and end up running around being controlled by their kids.
For instance, when someone falls down and is fussing, either “oh get up, you are fine, that didn’t hurt” or “oh my gosh! you must be really hurt! let me smother you in kisses and make it better!” are telling the kid what to feel/think, and if the response doesn’t actually match the severity of the fall, then this is quite confusing for the kid. A better response is “are you alright?”; then the kid can decide if they are actually just surprised, or if they are in pain and want comforting, or if they are seriously injured and need more significant help.
Again, anecdotally, I have observed that the parents who get run over by their kids tend to be the same ones who are consistently ignoring or denying the kids’ feelings (or sometimes largely ignoring the kids’ existence unless they are misbehaving). Demanding things and throwing tantrums is one of the few ways the kids find to get the attention they crave.
Accepting someone’s feelings doesn’t mean giving them whatever they want. It just means listening to what they are actually saying, and then responding to that in an empathetic way (a good start is to just echo back what they are saying or what you think they might be feeling).
To any parents out there: I recommend the book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.
The kids are looking to you to find out what maximises your attention so that's what you have to manage before anything else. Of course you are not just saying "oh get up, your are fine" to someone who is actually crying because they hurt themselves but there is plenty of room from that and then to someone who cries for every little thing.
So again balance. Read the situation and react to that.
Sadly, I think you are right. The barrier for being a good enough parent is lower than most of us like.
I have been seeing this advice a lot lately.
I wonder whether some of the value of that you get from following this advice as a parent is that you consciously decide to minimize the impact of the fundamental attribution error (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
Being on the receiving end of that kind of error can feel unpleasantly unfair and can hurt your relationship with the person who makes it ("when X bad thing happens to me, I was unlucky; when it happens to you, it's your fault for being unprepared").
I will share a tip that seemed to work pretty good, most of the time. All negatives can be stated as a positive. For example, instead of "Don't run!" maybe say "Please walk".
Takes a lot of practice. The biggest change, of course, is in me (ourselves), a shift in attitude, trying to figure out positive vs negative reinforcement.
* Please don't lick your knife.
* Please stop asking for X as I've already told you we can't afford it (I sometimes do offer to help them find a job though, or suggest an entrepreneurial idea; depends if it's a short term demand or a long-term or capital item.)
You could create a dummy action (distraction/redirection), which I see often -- it seems needlessly passive to me.
One could say "please take care with your knife" but that assumes the child knows what "care" means which is often a bad assumption with a child. One could also give the child a rubbish knife to remove the risk (I'd rather they have usable tools).
With commands like "don't run" by using the more passive "please walk" one is limiting unnecessarily. "Please skip, or jog, or walk, crawl, roll, sidle, shuffle, hop, shimmy, or ..." sometimes it's better to be direct (but maybe not always).
FWIW, you're getting your psych terminology mixed up AFAICT: "Please walk!" is a negative reinforcement, it's an admonishment to increase an action. "Thank you for walking" would be a positive reinforcement (only if they're already walking). In contrast "Don't run!" is a positive punishment, an admonishment to reduce an action. For completeness, a negative punishment would be taking away something to reduce an activity, maybe stopping smiling at a child when they misbehave.
I do agree it's good to reinforce desirable behaviour. One of the things that's difficult about being poor is finding no-cost pleasant stimulii for reinforcement. One can easily use food, which I think is possibly one of the factors in the obesity crisis.
* You were behaving really well ("like a grown up", which some kids love) when you were using your knife to cut the food only before
I see how this might take some practice to do on a regular basis. I think it should be easier if the positive/negative feedback is verbal only (that's good/that's bad and not much more), which relates to your point about no-cost reinforcement
Something like:
* Can I eat another banana?
* After we go for a walk, you can eat another banana.
Apparently another important part of the parenting process is consistency -- if you promise "after X, we will Y" you should do it or explain why not / what changed.
The conditions always change with children. If you already promise ice cream and then the kids start behaving badly, what can you do? You either get into threatening mode ("no ice cream for you then!") or break your promise or you put up with it.
Furthermore the kids don't even enjoy it unless it's unexpected. As soon as they feel entitled to the ice cream, they are more likely to argue about who has more than to just smile and eat it.
Promises often needs to be repeated to stick. Therefore they need to be made meaningful. Making promises about a banana when working memory have purged that information five minutes later just makes promising stuff pretty empty (for really small children, that is).
They’re just kids, it’s ok to let them have their toys in disorder on the apartment’s floor, that’s what toys are for, for playing, “keeping things in order” defeats the whole purpose of “playing”. Granted, I don’t have kids, but when I was young my parents didn’t push me at “tidying things up” and I feel that was good for me, because I had more time to let my imagination run wild. For a young brain imagination and whatever it is that stands behind the idea of playing are more important than the domestication tendencies like forcing children to “keep things in order”.
Imaginative play is important. But developmental psych suggests that a certain amount of order is necessary for later ability to focus and reason later. And honestly, if we didn't ask our toddler to clean up his toys we wouldn't have a living room :P
Japanese schoolchildren are expected to clean their classroom after lunch. It's a part of the curriculum, probably borrowed from the training rules of Zen monasteries. Japanese educators believe that it teaches cooperation and responsibility. It's a habit that sticks, as we have seen at the World Cup.
IMO, kids aren't terribly different to adults in their attitudes to work. They thrive when they're trusted with real responsibility and wither into cynicism and demotivation if they're kept busy with bullshit make-work. They'll live up to whatever is expected of them, for better and for worse.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2001/11/30/lifestyle/kids-...
https://www.si.com/extra-mustard/2018/07/03/tuesday-hot-clic...
This is especially clear to me among older kids and younger teenagers, who have already taken on themselves social roles in the groups they belong to. If they already see themselves as the one who gets in trouble in the classroom, for example, calling them out on it isn't very helpful.
One thing that might work is finding something they care about and giving them positive reinforcement and larger responsibilities (this is key) regarding it. It is not a panacea in itself, but it is a good peg to hang up some mutual respect on.
Sure there is. The results can by explained by how the brain resolves/reduces cognitive dissonance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Reduction
A central feature of many contemporary cognitive models is the notion of a 'schema,' which can be thought of as a record of beliefs/assertions on some subject. Cognitive dissonance arises when observations create a contradiction within a schema; reduction of cognitive dissonance involves modifying the schema in a way that (as best as possible) accounts for all observations. (Sometimes there isn't a good way of doing it and some pretty strange behavior may result.)
Another way of looking at it is that your schemas constrain your behavior so that the actions you take, insofar as it's possible, are consistent with both your goals and your relevant schemata.
So if you can actually modify someone's schema for the subject of their self, you can influence their behavior so that it becomes consistent with that modification.
Hence, theoretically, you tell someone they're "so compassionate" etc. and they start playing the part. Now, in practice, I doubt this will do much. Your statements are a bit of data supporting some assertion that can become part of their 'self schema,' but there's a whole lot of other data coming from other places that will conflict with the b.s. you're telling the person.
So they told him he looked good and he seemed to be peppier for the input. But the news of the experiment had leaked, everyone started telling him how good he looked wherever he went, and as the day wore on he started to react negatively to all the positive reinforcement. At the end of the day he yelled at some girl to leave him alone who had innocently complimented him. And then it went on some weeks more because nobody realized they should stop the experiment.
So he stopped taking care of his physical appearance! (remember, this was the 80s) and fast forward couple years later he was a real dirtbag punk rocker antisocial as anything.
So whenever I hear this stuff I think of this apocryphal story, mainly because of how ridiculous it is.
I had a two music teachers back in the day. One would call me on every flaw in a fairly negative way. I got to the point of dreading my weekly lesson. I got to college and the prof there gave targeted attaboys for things I was doing well, or (this is key) showed signs of improvement at. I worked much harder for the attaboys than I did to avoid disparagement.
That’s not to say flaws can’t be corrected ever... it’s just that positive encouragement is typically more effective than negative signaling in my experience.
So I guess I'm open minded about this sort of thing.
It feels like something out of a Kafka or Orwell or PK Dick novel.
Next up: compassion training!
It has a lot to do with un-teaching (self-)oppression and habitual cruelty.
It’s a wonderful superpower I have, limited by the fact that I can only teach it to someone whose request is sincere.
Phillip K. Dick also described a machine in "Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep," which injected the right chemicals to emulate emotional predispositions, such as compassion.
That said, I'm certain your one-on-one training is very helpful to those with an open heart and mind. My brother had to go to AA after drinking and beating his son. The whole time he complained, and I couldn't help thinking to myself, who beats their child and cannot muster up enough compassion to admit they were wrong. He was later diagnosed as manic, and I've noticed he also demonstrates a predilection for self-cruelty (per your comment).
He works at Oracle (for example). No disrespect meant to people who work at Oracle, but I've heard it's not a very easy-going place to work.
Your brother’s story brings me sadness. I see a lot of suffering, both for him and for the ones around him. I hope he is able to find a way toward healing. Introspection can be an important step of this process.
Labeling is a violent process as it replaces the person in our relationship with the label we project onto them, thus confining them to that projection, taking away from their humanity. It is easy to recognize it when applied with the explicit purpose of dehumanization (Jews as “vermin”, immigrants/refuges as “illegals”).
Mental health diagnoses do a bit or a lot of this, too, unless one is able to intentionally look at the diagnosed as a human being, especially in difficult situations.
The mention of Oracle makes me think that Pieter Hintjens’ book, Psychopath Code, may be of interest for you — it looks into the mental health of organizations. https://legacy.gitbook.com/@hintjens
Your mind can get comprised, but you can also have the sense knocked into you. These things aren't invariant conditions each person either is or isn't. 3 generations go by and all the while, everyone who isn't an outlier, everyone who conforms to a norm of having esteem - is there a point to labeling it for those people? Would they carry that word around if they found no purpose for it?
Weird mantra, sure, or just talking - seeking, finding.
If you want to do some good in the world, sincerely appreciate the good in people and help them feel seen in it.
I could see this working in some contexts, but in others I'd be worried about trying to influence someone's identity or self-awareness.
I'd imagine the pressure of trying to live up to a label you didn't choose for yourself could be overwhelming for some people.
True, also anyone wrongly labeled as rapist or child molester could probably explain in detail why it's a terrible idea.
Another side of this is that I've seen people do this when frustrated, and after a while it can start feeling nasty and passive-aggressive and difficult to respond to. Or be around.
http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-undermine-west-democra...
It’s working a treat.
Never before have intelligence agencies had such direct access to populations.
I believe this is relevant because the author's comparison of placebos and virtue labelling hinges on whether or not the practices are deceptive. But the norms around informed consent mean that using placebos in clinical trials does not, IMO, involve deception. I'm not sure if there's a comparable mitigation to make virtue labelling not deceptive (can you imagine handing someone a consent form saying "I will sometimes lie to you about whether or not I think you are a good person, for your own good"?)
[0] https://www.fda.gov/RegulatoryInformation/Guidances/ucm40497...
[1] https://www.research.uci.edu/compliance/human-research-prote...
"Either seem as you are or be as you seem."
In Turkish:
"Ya olduğun gibi görün ya da göründüğün gibi ol."
I feel like Horoscopes and Zodiac signs do this, in a sense. To prescribe traits to an individual based on some quality out of their control, like their birth date, and have those traits told to them repeatedly throughout their lifetime (if they're surrounded by the kind of people who would do so), that individual would grow Into those traits
I was always under the impression that placebos worked even when patients new that they were getting placebos, is this not true?
(Sorry to badger the point, it just seems so under-appreciated and misunderstood.)
In any case, I'm saying that the so-called "Placebo Effect" is activated by the patient's belief that they will heal, which is created by the "story" told and acted out by the people around them. The word "placebo" has no inherent effect, nor does the pill, it's all a kind of hypnotic suggestion that activates a somewhat mysterious ability of people to heal themselves.
The GP said, "Presumably the placebo effect is stronger when patients do not realise they are getting placebos."
This reflects a common misconception, usually born out of the "fact" that "fake pills can't cure you".
But it turns out that this "fact" in, in fact, not true. Fake pills can cure some people some of the time. This fact is as established as a fact can be, over and over again, in thousands of studies and cases.
Imagine someone with an illness and who has never heard the word "placebo" or anything about it. Maybe you two are stuck on a deserted island. The point is, you can pick up a bit of bark or shell or a pebble or something, wave your hand over it and mumble some magic words, and tell them with total conviction that it has a good chance of curing them... because it's true.
So my first point is that it doesn't directly matter whether people know they're getting a fake pill or not, it depends on what they've been led to believe about the efficacy of fake pills. Anything that lends credibility (ability to believe) to the possibility of healing for the patient can be expected to "amplify" the "effect".
My second point, which I think you're asking about, is that the whole healing is done by the "story" engendering belief which then somehow activates the patient's own ability to heal, and that this is a kind of hypnosis, or at least related to hypnosis. Because, again, there's no magic in the word "placebo" either to strengthen or weaken the "placebo effect" and "fake pills can't cure you". Right? So it has to be "all in your head".
I mean what would you call it if I told you a story and gave you a piece of candy and your illness cured itself? Is that not hypnosis?
There's a joke people tell to disparage "alternative medicine": If it works, it's just called "medicine".
My third point is that this should happen for the "Placebo Effect"! The power of theater-- of storytelling and the mind --to engage healing should form a third pillar of medicine along with Biochemistry and Surgery.
Let's say hypothetically that two patients received this 'theater treatment' - but one had an amazing actor and the other had a mediocre actor. The amazing actor convinced Patient A of the efficacy of the treatment better than Patient B.
If you believe that 'theater treatment' or the placebo effect is binary then it doesn't matter how good the actors are, and therefore they will get better at the same rate. If you believe 'theater treatment' isn't binary, then the more the person believes in the treatment, the faster their condition will improve. That's what I mean by binary vs a spectrum.
There's evidence that placebo treatments aren't binary - e.g. placebo injections work better than pills - http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.....
Therefore, with reference to my original statement 'Presumably the placebo effect is stronger when patients do not realise they are getting placebos'. In both cases, the placebo effect will work, however it will work better if the theater is more convincing - and it's more convincing when they aren't told it's sugar pills.
So it would seem that the presentation of medical advice would have an effect on that.
[0] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
You can actually tell someone in a "medically authoritative and confident" way that something is a placebo and that it might work because it's true. The drug studies prove that over and over again. If you said, "This is just a sugar pill so it can't possibly help you." that would be a lie. It doesn't matter what you call it: "Placebo" or "Cure-a-tin Oxynonsense" or whatever. Those fake pills are going to cure some of the people, some of the time. The content of the story doesn't matter, only the sincere belief that the "magic" pill can work.
Anyway, these studies are double-blind. The person administering the pills doesn't know if they're real or placebo.
I have to say, I think it's pretty ridiculous that we don't spend more time and energy trying to scientifically study the placebo effect, aka the incredible healing power of belief. It's been shown to work on almost everything-- sometimes for some people.
Nearly every disease, syndrome, condition, etc. has been cured one or more times, in a medically scientifically recorded case, by "medicine" that has no medicinal value. I've even heard about a case of placebo knee surgery. The common factor in all these cases seems to be that the person involved believed they were going to heal.
Back in the 70's a couple of guys were going to sell placebo pills. The bottle came with a booklet that listed the percentage effectiveness for all sorts of ailments as established by medical tests! If the pills have a low effectiveness for your particular illness, well, you just take more... The FDA was not amused.
People on some parts of the internet use the term "virtue signaling" in a mocking way. I haven't seen "virtue labeling" used that way.
I should email them and tell them that they are a respectable and responsible company that ensures they nor their employees nor their advertisers would ever run unnecessary code on their visitor's machines.
Insincerity is in contradiction to good character, and attempting to foster good character in others by deliberately lying to them is obviously hypocritical and foolish.
Virtue is a greater solvent than water. You can always find a way to honestly encourage better character in others, if only you start with yourself. (Someone once hugged Stalin and he cried. Stalin! He said something like, "You're the only one who has treated me like a human being." It didn't stop him doing what he did, but my point is even he was frail before virtue.)
For quite some time I regarded this as a humanist approach, but then I changed my mind and consider rewards used in this way not much different from punishments. Even if you don't try to use it manipulatively (which is obviously evil) but actually care about another person, it's still too dangerous and, I believe, eventually detrimental to the person's well-being. Besides, it's very easy to deceive yourself that you're not trying to manipulate while you actually are.
Consider that, for example, many video games follow the Skinner's model to the letter: they reward the desired behavior (playing) by dispensing some virtual rewards from time to time. Not regularly, so it's not boring, but often enough so that you get the boost and continue; and from time to time they give "better" rewards (more rare or in exchange to a number of smaller ones, so they look subjectively more expensive). It's easy to see people addicted to these games.