Psychology

How kind is humankind?

Augustine had it that ‘no one is free from sin, not even an infant’. Machiavelli deemed that humans are ‘ungrateful, fickle hypocrites’, and even the founding father John Adams, the paragon of American democracy, was sure that all men would be tyrants if they could. Thucydides, Luther, Calvin, Burke, Bentham, Nietzsche, Freud — all were wrong about our natures. So was William Golding, creator of Lord of the Flies, himself a child-beater* and a drunk. For a treatise on human kindness, Rutger Bregman’s new book Humankind has surprisingly many villains. Here’s ‘a radical idea… a mind-bending drug… denied by religions and ideologies’, we’re told. Humans are not evil. Deep down,

For Tom Cutler, being diagnosed autistic was the happiest day of his life

It’s easy to forget that until the late 1980s the notion of an autistic person being able to write a compelling autobiography was dismissed by the psychiatric establishment as highly unlikely. Though the term ‘autism’ was originally derived from the Greek word for self, autos, people with ‘self-ism’ — who were routinely described by non-autistic experts as being ‘trapped in their own world’ — were ironically thought to be incapable of the kind of introspection and self-reflection necessary to produce trustworthy documentation of their own experience. When the industrial designer Temple Grandin published Emergence: Labeled Autistic in 1986, it was billed as ‘the first book written by a recovered autistic

Does this make your brain tingle? The rapid rise of ASMR

I once had a flatmate called Tom, who behaved very oddly when our cleaner came round. On mornings when she was due he’d become strangely excited, like a man waiting for a date, though Madge (70) seemed an unlikely target. I would leave the flat so that Madge could get on with it, but Tom would insist on staying. He’d settle himself into an armchair, close his eyes and sit there, still as a toad, as she hoovered and dusted around him. Eventually I asked him about it, and he confessed. Listening to Madge, he said, ‘makes my brain feel nice’. As he explained it, the sounds of cleaning, sweeping

Is the judiciary really so bad at judging character?

When I had a cough last week, my son Joe,  who has autism, shouted at me and covered his ears. I didn’t mean to cough but, to Joe, so what? His autism means he doesn’t get other people’s intentions. People like him are sometimes said to lack a ‘theory of mind’ — lacking the idea that Dad or anyone else even has a mind, possessed of its own thoughts and intentions. This complicates his life infinitely. And that alerts us to a commonplace miracle: the contrast with the rest of us. Often we can see inside other people’s heads. We’re prolific theorisers about what they’re thinking. What’s more, we’re often

Sport and mind games

Years ago, a friend persuaded me that a reviewer should almost never give a book a bad review. Most books, he argued, are written with honest effort. Writers often devote years of their lives, whereas reviewers put in hours. Even a mediocre book that hardly anyone will ever read generally contains something worth passing on in a review. Savage reviews are usually just attempts to show off. Ed Hawkins, a respected investigative sports journalist, worked hard on The Men on Magic Carpets. But I struggle to find anything good to say about it. He starts from an interesting premise: during the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United

The couple who conned the world

The other day in the Guardian’s Blind Date column, two participants, or victims, finished off an account of their frightful encounter by dismissing any chance of a future relationship: ‘I’m sure two ENFPs might wear each other out.’ The acronym is perhaps not familiar to everyone, but that, coming from a couple of young people steeped in human resources gibberish, would have been the point. The woman involved was showing off her Myers-Briggs personality type. Myers-Briggs is an American analysis of personality first used in the 1940s, which gained huge success in the 1950s. It was a decade in which, as Merve Emre poetically says, ‘the stench of political paranoia

Books Podcast: Steven Pinker

This week’s books podcast was recorded live at a special Spectator subscriber event in London, where I was talking to the Harvard scientist and leading public intellectual Steven Pinker about his new book Enlightenment Now. Steven argues that – despite what the news tells us by every measure human well-being now is greater than at any previous point in history. And he attributes this to the values of the Enlightenment. I asked him: which Enlightenment? Can morality really be based on reason alone? And what’s a professor of cognitive science and linguistics doing in this subject area anyway? You can hear his answers below. And if you enjoyed that, please

A girl with green eyes

I loved a man. But our affair was nasty, brutish and short. Copious weeping was my un-tart retort. All that’s left of him is a stained T-shirt. I must rid my mind of him now. That’s long overdue. But how? These three books seem to present three answers. I’ve been wonkily underlining whole paragraphs and brooding over what to do. Nowadays, if you admit to being heartbroken after the fact you’re treated as a malingerer. So I very much appreciated Giulia Sissa’s Jealousy: A Forbidden Passion — a scholarly defence of indulging your violent fury. In the age of Tinder, your next paramour is but a thumb-swipe away, so the

The subtle art of showing off

This has been an interesting year for me. Back in January, I took up a full-time job as director of New Schools Network, the free schools charity, and it’s the first time I’ve worked in an office since parting company with Vanity Fair 20 years ago. It has taken a bit of getting used to. Until I took this job, I used to work out of a shed at the bottom of my garden. It is not so much a ‘man cave’ as a ‘Toby cave’. The walls are covered with egocentric tat — framed newspaper cartoons, posters of plays I’ve written, pictures of me with famous people, etc. It’s all

High stakes and chips

According to the subtitle, this is a collection of ‘short stories of long nights at the poker table’. Were that the case, this would be a more enjoyable book, but there are too many stories here that stray from the baize. As a game, poker is relatively simple. The deal gives you your ‘hole’ cards, the ones you and no one else can see. They determine whether you play the hand or not. The betting follows as cards are further distributed. One by one players drop out, hopes dashed. Finally someone wins, not necessarily with the best hand. Beginning, middle, end. Poker has a richer literature than any other card

Help over the hump

Losing our way in life’s trackless forest, whither should we turn for solace and advice? Wisdom used to be the special province of our elders, though for no better reason than that old people were less common than they are now. Aristotle had their measure: ‘As they have a lot of experience,’ he wrote, ‘they are sure about nothing, and under-do everything.’ Now the old are as common as grass, and we draw the truth about life experience as much as possible from the source. If you want to know how a child feels, ask a child. If you want a considered opinion about Muslim dress codes, stop opining into

Sutherland’s Law of Bad Maths

Imagine for a moment a parallel universe in which shops had mostly not yet been invented, and that all commerce took place online. This may seem like a fantastical notion, but it more or less describes rural America 100 years ago. In 1919 the catalogues produced by Sears, Roebuck & Company and Montgomery Ward were, for the 52 per cent of Americans who then lived in rural areas, the principal means of buying anything remotely exotic. In that year, Americans spent over $500 million dollars on mail order purchases, half through the two Chicago companies. Yet in 1925, Sears opened its first bricks and mortar shop. By 1929, the pair had

Damage limitation

One of the most pitiful sights in conflict areas is the local prosthetics store, with its rows of artificial limbs, sized from adult down to tiny child. A poignant reminder that, whether fleeing a war or injured in one, the human body and mind are subjected to extreme damage. Imagine triggering an improvised explosive device (IED) that shreds your leg and sends shrapnel, soil and debris deep into your body. Would you be able to apply a tourniquet to your injured leg, to prevent bleeding out from severed arteries? Soldiers are trained to do this. Some wear tourniquets in position, ready to wind tight should the worst happen. Your village

Travelling hopefully

Olga Tokarczuk examines questions of travel in our increasingly interconnected and fast-moving world. The award-winning Polish writer channels her wanderlust into reflections upon the places she visits, sometimes in a handful of lines, sometimes in longer chapters, telling other people’s and her own stories. Her prose, however, is anything but conventional travel writing, and she is the first to point out the danger she would be in otherwise: ‘Describing something is like using it — it destroys.’ Trained as a psychologist, Tokarczuk is interested in what connects the human soul and body. It is a leitmotif that, despite the apparent lack of a single plot, tightly weaves the text’s different

Race, gender and a terrifying witch hunt

A leading article appeared in Nature last week in defence of intelligence research. It lamented the fact that it is not included on the undergraduate psychology curricula of many leading US universities, and attributed this to its association in the minds of students and faculties with elitism and racism. That, in turn, is due to the misuse of intelligence research in the past by eugenicists and ‘race scientists’ to justify their poisonous beliefs. The article expressed the hope that this toxic baggage can be discarded and intelligence rehabilitated as an important strand of psychology. This optimism is often shared by academics who study the genetic basis of human differences; not

Memory games | 2 March 2017

Poor Paul Nuttall. He seemed to have everything a cheeky by-election victor needed: the outsider vim, the accent, the cap. Then it emerged he had made stuff up about Hillsborough. That was that. He moved from admirable Scouser to tragedy-crasher. In interviews over the years, Nuttall has referred to being at the stadium in Sheffield on the terrible day, and he still insists he was. We shall probably never know why that developed on his website into his having lost ‘close personal friends’ there — something which is not, it seems, true. Yet while it is good fun blowing raspberries and deriding politicians, we should allow them a little understanding

Will my inner party animal roar back to life?

According to a front-page story in the Times earlier this week, your personality does change over the course of your lifetime. A study carried out by Edinburgh University found that the personalities of a group of people in their seventies had changed significantly since they were schoolchildren in the 1950s. Traits like perseverance, self-confidence and originality changed ‘beyond recognition’, according to the study’s leader Dr Mathew Harris. He was surprised, because the conventional wisdom among social psychologists is that these characteristics remain stable over a person’s lifetime. At first glance, my own personality would appear to bear out these findings. Between the ages of 14 and 40 I was something

Gaslighting the nation

Arguably the cruellest thing you can do to human beings is to rob them of faith in their own sanity. People can endure physical torment, even torture, so long as their minds are clear. If they feel sane, they can still make sense of what is happening to them and work out how to survive. But if you undermine somebody’s mental stability, they soon unravel. In the words of John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, ‘Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;/And in the lowest deep a lower deep,/Still threatening to devour me, opens wide.’ Chipping away at a person’s mental health is known as ‘gaslighting’, after Gas

What really drives us in the big game of life?

When were you last in a game reserve? Perhaps most Spectator readers will be familiar with the experience and if you’re anything like me it’s a happy one. Where would I rather be than in an open-topped Land Rover as the sun rises over the African bush, wandering on wheels through the savannah, pausing unhurried to look around: switching off the engine, listening, watching, drinking it all in? But do I care if I spot a hyena to tick off on my list? Do I seriously fret about whether that graceful creature is an oryx or an eland, whether that glittering and iridescent bird is a greater blue-eared starling or

When reasoning goes wrong

It’s the intellectual bromance of the last century. Two psychologists — Danny, a Holocaust kid and adviser to the Israel Defence Forces, and Amos, a former child prodigy and paratrooper — meet at the end of the 1960s, and sparks immediately begin to fly. They spend countless hours locked in rooms together at Hebrew University and elsewhere, and eventually co-write a series of papers that will revolutionise the field, and lead to the surviving partner being awarded the Nobel prize in economics. Not, however, before this extraordinary partnership has itself fallen apart, like a love affair, in regret and mutual recrimination. Our heroes are Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, celebrated