It’s Not Just the President’s Psychology that Should Give Us Pause, It’s the Whole Bias of Human Psychology toward Believing that We Are “The Decider”

“Bush Derangement Syndrome” (BDS) is the derisive way that Washington Post’s op-ed columnist Charles Krauthammer refers to psychologically oriented analyses of George W. Bush’s brand of presidential decision-making. (The Bush family itself styles such analysis as “psychobabble.”)

While it’s no secret that I generally find this President’s mental performance ranking somewhere between the ludicrous and the phantasmagorical, I’ve not given much ”ink” to BDS-type analyses to now.

But the presidential behaviors that have been the focus of such studies show no signs of improving. Deep soul-searching and insightful self-learning are not taking place for the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and aren’t like to. And the costs and the dangers of the psychological dynamics driving The Decider have grown. So it is time. Bring your spelunker’s headlamp because we are going inside the topic of the psyches of leaders.

It is not necessary to read all the studies of the President’s psychology to get the gist of their arguments and observations. Read one, and you’ve pretty much gotten the general drift of them all.

Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President is as good as any. This book was written by Justin Frank, a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center. The likely reasons for Mr. Bush’s unresolved psychological issues are all there: the absentee father, the authoritarian mother, the likely hyperactivity and dyslexia, the competition between siblings and the need to compete with his father’s yawning successes, the multi-generational poor parenting skills of his family, the lack of unconditional love, the out-sized privileges of his elite slice of society with few, consistent countervailing sources of wise guidance, correction and personal counsel—it’s all there. And so are the likely consequences: his drinking, his bullying and bellicosity, his constant lying, his religiosity and rigidity, his youthful cruelty to playmates, classmates and animals and now to his perceived international enemies. And, of course, his all-consuming sense of incompetence and inadequacy. It’s very troubling to realize that such a troubled youngster grew into such a troubled man who has now led his powerful country and the rest of the world down such a troubled path.

But as I refreshed my memory of all this, rather than a growing anger, I found myself with a certain empathy for this incorrigibly dysfunctional thinker who has visited such unnecessary pain and waste on the people he purports to serve.

As we all do, George W. Bush deserves considerable understanding and sympathy for his psychological shortcomings.

I’ve rarely found myself more moved than when reading of how Mr. Bush learned, at the age of six, that his sister, Robin, 4, was dead. When Robin was diagnosed with leukemia, George’s mother and dad left him in Texas for six months while they sought a cure for Robin in eastern U.S. hospitals. When she died, they didn’t tell young George at first. No one did. He didn’t realize that he no longer had a sister until he ran up to the family car upon his parents’ return to Houston and realized that his sister was not in the back seat. Mr. Bush would recall, “Minutes before I had a little sister, and now I didn’t. Forty-six years later, those moments remain the starkest memory of my childhood….” He didn’t add that he had no time to grieve for his beloved Robin. His mother battled depression and indeed her hair turned prematurely gray after Robin’s death. Son George had nightmares anchored in this, and possibly still does. Mr. Bush says the rest of his childhood was a happy blur, and it may have been. But I doubt it, frankly. I suspect this story is symbolic of more than only the events surrounding one four-year-old’s tragic passing.

Central though it seems to be to the failure of Mr. Bush’s presidency, his personal psychology may be the lesser part of the psychological story about this Administration and its deadly, corrosive, unresolved Iraqi War. The bigger picture is one of those Pogo-like “I have seen the enemy and it is I” issues. This is an argument that Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Price-winning economist and expert on human decision-making, and a colleague made in the January/February issues of Foreign Policy. Each of their points is capable of giving emotionally balanced individuals much to reflect on.

Here are key points that they made, and some of their commentary:

• People are prone to exaggerate their strengths. “[This] optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war.”

• People don’t consider what others are feeling and facing when they attempt to interpret the other party’s behaviors. “Instead, they attribute the behavior they see to the person’s nature, character or persistent motives.”

• People are equally bad at understanding how they appear to others. “This bias can manifest itself at critical stages in international crises,” such as when the U.S. misjudged how China might interpret the fact that U.S. forces were moving toward China on the Korean Peninsula in that 1950’s era conflict. [Or when Mr. Bush and his advisers misjudged how the Arab world would greet their involvement in Iraq.]

• People are excessively optimistic. “Psychological research has show that a large majority of people believe themselves to be smarter, more attractive, and more talented than average, and they commonly overestimate their future success.”

• People are prone to an “illusion of control.” “They consistently exaggerate the amount of control they have over outcomes that are important to them—even when the outcomes are in fact random or determined by other forces.”

• The optimistic bias and the illusion of control are contagious forces in the run-up to conflict. “Optimistic generals will be found, usually on both sides, before the beginning of every military conflict.”

• People are gloomy when evaluating another side’s concessions. “The very fact that a concession is offered by somebody perceived as hostile undermines the content of the proposal.”

• People have a deep-seated aversion to cutting their losses. This tendency to avoid a certain loss in favor of a potential gain keeps conflicts going longer than they should by other measures. The situation is made worse by “the fact that for the leaders who have led their nation to the brink of defeat, consequences of giving up will usually not be worse if the conflict is prolonged, even if they are worse for the citizens they lead.”

These kinds of predictable decision-making errors—what psychologists call biases—are why “policymakers come to the debate predisposed to believe their hawkish advisors more than the doves,” these experts suggest. And understanding these biases “can at least help ensure that the hawks don’t win more arguments than they should.”

So the problem is not just Mr. Bush’s psychology. The problem is also our human psychology in general. And thus the problem is not going to go away when Mr. Bush leaves office. The problem may never go away. That's a thought that left me in need of fresh air and a walk in the sunshine after doing this bit of research. And more determined than ever to do what I can to insist that people pay attention to what their brain is doing to what their mind is thinking and deciding.

Purchase Justin Frank’s book here: Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President

For an extensive discussion of the Bush family’s psychology from a “centrist” perspective, go here: George Bush, Father & Son: 18 Psychological Keys

Read Daniel Kahneman’s and Jonathan Renshon’s Foreign Policy article here: Why Hawks Win

Posted on January 24, 2007

Does the Mind Evolve? We Argue It Does but Admit that More Than 2,000 Years After the Roman Gladiators, It Is Still More Likely to Beat Itself Up Than Lift Itself Up

A reader in the U.K. writes:

Dudley, I read The Mother of All Minds over the past week or so. Obviously it struck many chords with me. I share many of your observations and perhaps have experienced some similar experiences. I am not so sure about the evolutionary aspect of Mind, however. I often feel that there are competing operating systems in the world running in parallel. Some people are simply programmed using an entirely different language and logic. The really interesting thing of course is the ability to reprogram, upgrade or switch, if the desire is there and the tools are made available. So choice becomes the operative word.

"I choose to change" was once described to me by a clinical psychologist as the most critical statement that a person can make (my sister is manic depressive bipolar and I was working with her to try and change self-destructive behaviour). This is a powerful statement and has echoes of Nietzsche—another section that resonated with me in your book.

I have replied to this independently spirited individual privately. First, to thank him for taking the time to read my book. Secondly, to encourage him to read it again, this time aware of just how much his own “operating system” may have filtered what he gleaned from the book on its first reading. A gentleman and a serious scholar, he agreed to do so.

He and I are in agreement, I do believe, that “there are competing operating systems [of mind] in the world running in parallel.” I wrote about such systems repeatedly in The Mother of All Minds. But if these systems aren’t evolutionary in their development, then it is my suspicion that they stand in repudiation of evolutionary theory, which is going to be upsetting to many scientists (including, I think, my U.K. correspondent, who has a Ph.D. in biology, once he thinks it through).

If those of us who believe we see plentiful evidence of mind taking a Darwinian “descent with modification” path are right (including one of my mentors, the late Clare Graves, who bequeathed us a powerful model of evolving levels of human existence), then that is hopeful news. But not, as the world demonstrates minute by minute, news as hopeful as, well, as we would hope. Because the number of the planet’s citizens whose minds have grown increasingly more—how shall we say it?—at home with complexity, diversity and possibility appears to be greatly overshadowed by the number whose minds are stuck.

How else do you explain, for example, the rising popularity of the savage sport of so-called "mixed martial arts"? In a lengthy article Sunday, a Los Angeles Times reporter described how “a spectacle melding ancient fighting tactics with those of a bar brawl” is poised to go mainstream as a new American economic and culture force.

The roots of the “sport” are traced to a Victorville, CA, seafood restaurant owner’s practice in the early 1990s of closing his establishment at 10 p.m. and then going at his employees and remaining patrons. He told the Times reporter: “I beat the hell out of them." The resulting activity is also called “human cockfighting,” “extreme fighting,” “cage fighting,” and “ultimate fighting.” Fueled by promoters and pay-per-view (usually $39.95 per fight) cable television, the Times article reports, this brutal melange is about to be exported to Canada, Mexico and Europe as America’s latest contribution to the world entertainment industry.

It is further evidence that the mind is its own worst enemy and obstacle to its own evolution that mixed martial arts is already being blamed for thousands of America’s teenagers mimicking such fights in backyards and parking lots and then posting videos of their mayhem on YouTube. One of its aficionados calls no-holds-barred and no-rules-enforced fighting "the sport for these times.” Blood, says the LA Times writer, is the new black.

If so (and who can argue with the new sport’s success?), then times are grim. And, of course, they are grim. The world is awash in violence caused by minds calibrated to make poor choices. No fight happens without someone making a bad choice. No war happens without someone—usually, a lot of someones—making bad choices. No sport this gratuitously brutal takes root and flowers unless large numbers of humans are making bad choices. No one celebrates and/or augments the gratuitous pain and injury of another if they have developed a mind capable of making good choices.

Yes, I think the evidence is good at this point that the mind evolves. I read the evidence as suggesting that it generally evolves in predictable, increasingly understood stages.

But I don’t see most minds alive today evolving at nearly the speeds needed to equip their users with good choice-making skills. And I don’t see enough minds evolving to the extent that we can hope to avoid more 9/11s. More Iraqs. More Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. More Darfurs. More drive-by shootings. More made-for-YouTube backyard human cock fights. Or the runaway growth and popularity of a sporting event that brags about its savagery and tendency to make boxing look tame.

In 2,000 years, in its best moments, the human mind has evolved to the point where it has taken an almost universal stand against slavery, outlawed racism as an unseemly and unacceptable social attitude, steadily increased its questioning of war as a rational approach to problem-solving, activated sensibilities within itself to identify with the pain of most any pain-experiencing creature, questioned the global consequences of its own actions and routinely come to examine about what is desirable for the greater good of the greater number for the most foreseeable future possible.

Also in 2,000 years, the minds you often rub elbows, eyeballs or electrons with on the street, in the workplace, on the Internet, on the TV or computer or game console screen, maybe even at the dinner table, have evolved no farther that the gladiator’s fighting pit.

My valued reader in the U.K and I are fully in agreement on this point: the way upward on the mind’s evolutionary journey is a willful one. You go higher by making good choices. Providing humans with supportive environmental encouragement and critical thinking skills for making good choices can work wonders in speeding the evolution of a single mind. But can it ever be done so as to get a critical mass of human minds to the point where the celebration of violence is automatically viewed as the atavistic and inane “choice” of partially and poorly formed personalities and mentalities?

We do seem to have a long way to go, and few really good ideas as yet on how to get there. One small step that any of us can take to encourage further evolution of the human mind in an evolving number of humans is act to choke off the feed stocks of violence. You and I can help do it with our vote. We can do it with how we spend our dollars. We can do it by how we spend our time. We can do it with what we allow to be aired on our TV or computer screens. We can do it with our musical selections. We can do it with the toys and games and other entertainment we choose for our children and grandchildren. There are many ways to do it. But violence is so pervasive and so elemental in today’s money-is-the-guiding-ethic global market economy and thoughtlessness-is-the-preferred-state-of-mind entertainment environment that we have to choose not to augment violence or it will sneak right past us.

Read Scott Gold’s Los Angeles Times article here [may require registration]: Knockout marketing

For more information about my book, go here: The Mother of All Minds

Posted on January 14, 2007

One of the World’s Smallest “Engines of Change” Is Also One of Its Most Powerful. On An Almost Unimaginable Scale, the Amygdala Rules

Over the holidays, Sherry and I traveled to Florida to visit the grandson (and his parents and our other daughter, too). Once again, I was transfixed by how magically and effortlessly the grandmother can influence the behaviors of a four-year-old often hell-bent, like most four-year-olds (not to mention Frank Sinatra, Paul Anka, Elvis Presley, Sid Vicious and Dogbert), on insisting that he get to do it “my way.”

What she does is seemingly effortless and done with near-endless patience and faith that a non-train-wreck outcome is always possible with the little guy if you’ll just use your smarts and hang in there a little longer.

When it appears that the excrement is about to hit the fan with him, she turns into a micromanager in a very good sense. If he’s out of control, she goes to work on getting him focused. If he’s overly focused, she encourages him to light up. If he can’t see the forest for the trees, she helps him understand the consequences of going tree-less. If things are looking overwhelmingly negative for him, she moves swiftly to rearranges his environment so that it may not be necessary for him to look from that vantagepoint at all.

If there was a centerpiece of a principle or technique in her formidable child management skills, for the longest I couldn’t see exactly what it was. But on this trip the aha! arrived. I can now see that in his presence this boy’s grandmother is doing a deliberate brain change thing as surely as neutrons have synapses! She causes his brain to change its moods almost on (her) demand. And when you change the mood of a homo sapiens, you almost guarantee a change in what an individual is likely to do—what she or he is capable of doing—next.

Now, this is not a new idea. For example, creativity, high performance and stress prevention consultants have long espoused the merits of Be Happy moods for opening the mind to new ideas and wider perspectives and more propitious problem-solving outcomes. What’s now happening is that neuroscientists are beginning to zero in on the brain mechanics of such mood changes.

In fact, you may have noticed that a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just before Christmas got a lot of media ink. Researchers at the University of Toronto announced new data that suggests that our mood affects the way we process information. Think of your attention as like a spotlight, say these researchers. A good mood will widen that spotlight—you can see a lot more (and if you aren’t careful you may see too much!). Conversely, a negative mood tightens your focus and makes you focus acutely on certain specifics (and that can easily be detrimental if you need to be observing a lot of things at once).

In terms of brain parts, one researcher, Dr. Robert Maurer at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, says suspicions fall heavily on the mid-brain’s amygdala. “The amygdala triggers fear, and fear can shut down the part of the brain that makes you creative. When you are happy, the amygdala is quiet….”

Here, then, are two hugely important cycles for our brain:
Overheated amygdala = fear = negative moods = sharper focus = (potentially) tunnel vision.
Well-cooled amygdala = pleasure = positive moods = wide-beam attention = (potentially) observing too much or too little attentively.

In addition to explaining my grandson’s grandmother’s skills at influencing his behaviors, I strongly suspect that the consequences of these two brain cycles are being writ large all around us on an almost daily basis.

For example, in my metro area of North Texas, we have a suburb named Farmers Branch. It has a mayor and city council that have declared war on “illegal aliens”—mostly immigrants from South and Central America who are in the U.S. without authority. The latest move of the city fathers and mothers is a law outlawing the rental of apartments to anyone who can’t prove legal immigrant status. Apparently, the town's politicians passed the law without giving much if any thought to what the full range of results of such a law would be, and even before it goes into effect, the law is threatening to tear the town apart. What led to all this? I’d suggest there were a lot of overheated amygdalas in Farmers Branch, and now there are more than ever.

The same thing happened nationally with 9/11. Not in our lifetime have so many amygdalas become so quickly overheated. And because the resulting tunnel so completely swallowed our ability to envision consequences and nuances, our national identify and well-being in America continue to be at risk from inactivity or proactive measures of an inept or ill-targeted kind.

But things may not be quite as bad as they were. Amygdalas may be cooling. Otherwise, we would not have seen the national election results of Nov. 7. And the author of the current No. 1 New York Times non-fiction bestseller, a book called The Audacity of Hope, would not have emerged as a serious potential presidential candidate almost overnight. And former presidential counselor Bill Moyers almost certainly would not have uttered these words a few weeks ago to a blue-chip audience of progressives in New York:

“We have a story of … power. It is that the promise of America leaves no one out. Go now, and tell it on the mountains. From the rooftops, tell it. From your laptops, tell it. From the street corners and from Starbucks, tell it. Tell it at the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque. Tell it where you can, when you can and while you can—to every candidate for office, to every talk-show host and pundit, to corporate executives and schoolchildren. Tell it—for America’s sake.”

The brain simply can’t conjure those kinds of words, or sit in approving reception of them, with overheated amygdalas. No more than Sherry’s and my grandson can easily see the wisdom of doing something different when his amygdala is overwrought. May the amygdalas of America continue to cool for some time to come. For the world’s sake.

Read about the University of Toronto’s and other researchers’ findings about moods and attention here:
Happy Emotions Boost Creativity

Read the first chapter of U.S. Senator Barak Obama’s book here [registration may be required]:
The Audacity of Hope

Read an adaptation of Bill Moyers’ Dec. 12 remarks to a New York event sponsored by The Nation, Demos, the Brennan Center for Justice and the New Democracy project here:
For America’s Sake

Posted on January 07, 2007