Reporting Live from Tomorrow
In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Doris Day sang a
waltz whose final verse went like this:
When I was just a child in school,
I asked my teacher, “What will I try?
Should I paint pictures, should I sing songs?”
This was her wise reply:
“Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be.
The future’s not ours to see. Que sera, sera.”1
Now, I don’t mean to quibble with the lyricist, and I have nothing but fond memories of
Doris Day, but the fact is that this is not a particularly wise reply. When a child asks for
advice about which of two activities to pursue, a teacher should be able to provide more than
a musical cliché. Yes, of course the future is hard to see. But we’re all heading that way
anyhow, and as difficult as it may be to envision, we have to make some decisions about
which futures to aim for and which to avoid. If we are prone to mistakes when we try to
imagine the future, then how should we decide what to do?
Even a child knows the answer to that one: We should ask the teacher. One of the
benefits of being a social and linguistic animal is that we can capitalize on the experience of
others rather than trying to figure everything out for ourselves. For millions of years, human
beings have conquered their ignorance by dividing the labor of discovery and then
communicating their discoveries to one another, which is why the average newspaper boy in
Pittsburgh knows more about the universe than did Galileo, Aristotle, Leonardo,i or any of
those other guys who were so smart they only needed one name. We all make ample use of
this resource. If you were to write down everything you know and then go back through the
list and make a check mark next to the things you know only because somebody told you,
you’d develop a repetitive-motion disorder because almost everything you know is
secondhand. Was Yury Gagarin the first man in space? Is croissant a French word? Are there
more Chinese than North Dakotans? Does a stitch in time save nine? Most of us know the
answers to these questions despite the fact that none of us actually witnessed the launching
of Vostok I, personally supervised the evolution of language, hand-counted all the people in
Beijing and Bismarck, or performed a fully randomized double-blind study of stitching. We
know the answers because someone shared them with us. Communication is a kind of
“vicarious observation”2 that allows us to learn about the world without ever leaving the
comfort of our Barcaloungers. The six billion interconnected people who cover the surface of
our planet constitute a leviathan with twelve billion eyes, and anything that is seen by one
pair of eyes can potentially be known to the entire beast in a matter of months, days, or even
minutes.
The fact that we can communicate with one another about our experiences should
provide a simple solution to the core problem with which this book has been concerned. Yes,
our ability to imagine our future emotions is flawed — but that’s okay, because we don’t
have to imagine what it would feel like to marry a lawyer, move to Texas, or eat a snail when
there are so many people who have done these things and are all too happy to tell us about
them. Teachers, neighbors, coworkers, parents, friends, lovers, children, uncles, cousins,
coaches, cabdrivers, bartenders, hairstylists, dentists, advertisers — each of these folks has
something to say about what it would be like to live in this future rather than that one, and at
any point in time we can be fairly sure that one of these folks has actually had the experience
that we are merely contemplating. Because we are the mammal that shows and tells, each of
us has access to information about almost any experience we can possibly imagine — and
many that we can’t. Guidance counselors tell us about the best careers, critics tell us about
the best restaurants, travel agents tell us about the best vacations, and friends tell us about the
best travel agents. Every one of us is surrounded by a platoon of Dear Abbys who can
recount their own experiences and in so doing tell us which futures are most worth wanting.
Do we listen too well when others speak, or do we not listen well enough? As we shall see,
the answer to that question is yes.
Given the overabundance of consultants, role models, gurus, mentors, yentas,ii and nosy
relatives, we might expect people to do quite well when it comes to making life’s most
important decisions, such as where to live, where to work, and whom to marry. And yet, the
average American moves more than six times,3 changes jobs more than ten times,4 and
marries more than once,5 which suggests that most of us are making more than a few poor
choices. If humanity is a living library of information about what it feels like to do just about
anything that can be done, then why do the people with the library cards make so many bad
decisions? There are just two possibilities. The first is that a lot of the advice we receive from
others is bad advice that we foolishly accept. The second is that a lot of the advice we receive
from others is good advice that we foolishly reject. So which is it? Do we listen too well
when others speak, or do we not listen well enough? As we shall see, the answer to that
question is yes.
Super-Replicators
The philosopher Bertrand Russell once claimed that believing is “the most mental thing we
do.”6 Perhaps, but it is also the most social thing we do. Just as we pass along our genes in an
effort to create people whose faces look like ours, so too do we pass along our beliefs in an
effort to create people whose minds think like ours. Almost any time we tell anyone
anything, we are attempting to change the way their brains operate — attempting to change
the way they see the world so that their view of it more closely resembles our own. Just
about every assertion — from the sublime (“God has a plan for you”) to the mundane (“Turn
left at the light, go two miles, and you’ll see the Dunkin’ Donuts on your right”) — is meant
to bring the listener’s beliefs about the world into harmony with the speaker’s. Sometimes
these attempts succeed and sometimes they fail. So what determines whether a belief will be
successfully transmitted from one mind to another?
The principles that explain why some genes are transmitted more successfully than others
also explain why some beliefs are transmitted more successfully than others.7 Evolutionary
biology teaches us that any gene that promotes its own “means of transmission” will be
represented in increasing proportions in the population over time. For instance, imagine that
a single gene were responsible for the complex development of the neural circuitry that
makes orgasms feel so good. For a person having this gene, orgasms would feel … well,
orgasmic. For a person lacking this gene, orgasms would feel more like sneezes — brief,
noisy, physical convulsions that pay rather paltry hedonic dividends. Now, if we took fifty
healthy, fertile people who had the gene and fifty healthy, fertile people who didn’t, and left
them on a hospitable planet for a million years or so, when we returned we would probably
find a population of thousands or millions of people, almost all of whom had the gene. Why?
Because a gene that made orgasms feel good would tend to be transmitted from generation to
generation simply because people who enjoy orgasms are inclined to do the thing that
transmits their genes. The logic is so circular that it is virtually inescapable: Genes tend to be
transmitted when they make us do the things that transmit genes. What’s more,
even bad genes — those that make us prone to cancer or heart disease — can become superreplicators if they compensate for these costs by promoting their own means of transmission.
For instance, if the gene that made orgasms feel delicious also left us prone to arthritis and
tooth decay, that gene might still be represented in increasing proportions because arthritic,
toothless people who love orgasms are more likely to have children than are limber, toothy
people who do not.
The same logic can explain the transmission of beliefs. If a particular belief has some
property that facilitates its own transmission, then that belief tends to be held by an
increasing number of minds. As it turns out, there are several such properties that increase a
belief’s transmissional success, the most obvious of which is accuracy. When someone tells
us where to find a parking space downtown or how to bake a cake at high altitude, we adopt
that belief and pass it along because it helps us and our friends do the things we want to do,
such as parking and baking. As one philosopher noted, “The faculty of communication
would not gain ground in evolution unless it was by and large the faculty of transmitting true
beliefs.”8 Accurate beliefs give us power, which makes it easy to understand why they are so
readily transmitted from one mind to another.
It is a bit more difficult to understand why inaccurate beliefs are so readily transmitted
from one mind to another — but they are. False beliefs, like bad genes, can and do become
super-replicators, and a thought experiment illustrates how this can happen. Imagine a game
that is played by two teams, each of which has a thousand players, each of whom is linked to
teammates by a telephone. The object of the game is to get one’s team to share as many
accurate beliefs as possible. When players receive a message that they believe to be accurate,
they call a teammate and pass it along. When they receive a message that they believe to be
inaccurate, they don’t. At the end of the game, the referee blows a whistle and awards each
team a point for every accurate belief that the entire team shares and subtracts one point for
every inaccurate belief the entire team shares. Now, consider a contest played one sunny day
between a team called the Perfects (whose members always transmit accurate beliefs) and a
team called the Imperfects (whose members occasionally transmit an inaccurate belief). We
should expect the Perfects to win, right?
Not necessarily. In fact, there are some special circumstances under which the Imperfects
will beat their pants off. For example, imagine what would happen if one of the Imperfect
players sent the false message “Talking on the phone all day and night will ultimately make
you very happy,” and imagine that other Imperfect players were gullible enough to believe it
and pass it on. This message is inaccurate and thus will cost the Imperfects a point in the end.
But it may have the compensatory effect of keeping more of the Imperfects on the telephone
for more of the time, thus increasing the total number of accurate messages they transmit.
Under the right circumstances, the costs of this inaccurate belief would be outweighed by its
benefits, namely, that it led players to behave in ways that increased the odds that they would
share other accurate beliefs. The lesson to be learned from this game is that inaccurate beliefs
can prevail in the belief-transmission game if they somehow facilitate their own “means
of transmission.” In this case, the means of transmission is not sex but communication, and
thus any belief — even a false belief — that increases communication has a good chance of
being transmitted over and over again. False beliefs that happen to promote stable societies
tend to propagate because people who hold these beliefs tend to live in stable societies,
which provide the means by which false beliefs propagate.
Some of our cultural wisdom about happiness looks suspiciously like a super-replicating
false belief. Consider money. If you’ve ever tried to sell anything, then you probably tried to
sell it for as much as you possibly could, and other people probably tried to buy it for as little
as they possibly could. All the parties involved in the transaction assumed that they would be
better off if they ended up with more money rather than less, and this assumption is the
bedrock of our economic behavior. Yet, it has far fewer scientific facts to substantiate it than
you might expect. Economists and psychologists have spent decades studying the relation
between wealth and happiness, and they have generally concluded that wealth increases
human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that
it does little to increase happiness thereafter.9 Americans who earn $50,000 per year are
much happier than those who earn $10,000 per year, but Americans who earn $5 million per
year are not much happier than those who earn $100,000 per year. People who live in poor
nations are much less happy than people who live in moderately wealthy nations, but people
who live in moderately wealthy nations are not much less happy than people who live in
extremely wealthy nations. Economists explain that wealth has “declining marginal utility,”
which is a fancy way of saying that it hurts to be hungry, cold, sick, tired, and scared, but
once you’ve bought your way out of these burdens, the rest of your money is an increasingly
useless pile of paper.10
So once we’ve earned as much money as we can actually enjoy, we quit working and
enjoy it, right? Wrong. People in wealthy countries generally work long and hard to earn
more money than they can ever derive pleasure from.11 This fact puzzles us less than it
should. After all, a rat can be motivated to run through a maze that has a cheesy reward at its
end, but once the little guy is all topped up, then even the finest Stilton won’t get him off his
haunches. Once we’ve eaten our fill of pancakes, more pancakes are not rewarding, hence we
stop trying to procure and consume them. But not so, it seems, with money. As Adam Smith,
the father of modern economics, wrote in 1776: “The desire for food is limited in every man
by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire of the conveniences and
ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or
certain boundary.”12
If food and money both stop pleasing us once we’ve had enough of them, then why do
we continue to stuff our pockets when we would not continue to stuff our faces? Adam Smith
had an answer. He began by acknowledging what most of us suspect anyway, which is that
the production of wealth is not necessarily a source of personal happiness.
In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, [the poor] are in no respect inferior to
those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the
different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of
the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.13
That sounds lovely, but if it’s true, then we’re all in big trouble. If rich kings are no happier
than poor beggars, then why should poor beggars stop sunning themselves by the roadside
and work to become rich kings? If no one wants to be rich, then we have a significant
economic problem, because flourishing economies require that people continually procure
and consume one another’s goods and services. Market economies require that we all have
an insatiable hunger for stuff, and if everyone were content with the stuff they had, then the
economy would grind to a halt. But if this is a significant economic problem, it is not a
significant personal problem. The chair of the Federal Reserve may wake up every morning
with a desire to do what the economy wants, but most of us get up with a desire to do
what we want, which is to say that the fundamental needs of a vibrant economy and the
fundamental needs of a happy individual are not necessarily the same. So what motivates
people to work hard every day to do things that will satisfy the economy’s needs but not their
own? Like so many thinkers, Smith believed that people want just one thing — happiness —
hence economies can blossom and grow only if people are deluded into believing that the
production of wealth will make them happy.14 If and only if people hold this false belief will
they do enough producing, procuring, and consuming to sustain their economies.
The pleasures of wealth and greatness … strike the imagination as something grand and
beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which
we are so apt to bestow upon it… . It is this deception which rouses and keeps in
continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to
cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent
and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which
have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of
nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new
fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations
of the earth.15
If parenting is such difficult business, then why do we have such a rosy view of it?
In short, the production of wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it
does serve the needs of an economy, which serves the needs of a stable society, which serves
as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth.
Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their
own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are
routes to personal well-being. Although words such as delusional may seem to suggest some
sort of shadowy conspiracy orchestrated by a small group of men in dark suits, the belieftransmission game teaches us that the propagation of false beliefs does not require that
anyone be trying to perpetrate a magnificent fraud on an innocent populace. There is no cabal
at the top, no star chamber,iii no master manipulator whose clever program of indoctrination
and propaganda has duped us all into believing that money can buy us love. Rather, this
particular false belief is a super-replicator because holding it causes us to engage in the very
activities that perpetuate it.16
The belief-transmission game explains why we believe some things about happiness that
simply aren’t true. The joy of money is one example. The joy of children is another that for
most of us hits a bit closer to home. Every human culture tells its members that having
children will make them happy. When people think about their offspring — either imagining
future offspring or thinking about their current ones — they tend to conjure up images of
cooing babies smiling from their bassinets, adorable toddlers running higgledy-piggledy
across the lawn, handsome boys and gorgeous girls playing trumpets and tubas in the school
marching band, successful college students going on to have beautiful weddings, satisfying
careers, and flawless grandchildren whose affections can be purchased with candy.
Prospective parents know that diapers will need changing, that homework will need doing,
and that orthodontists will go to Aruba on their life savings, but by and large, they think quite
happily about parenthood, which is why most of them eventually leap into it. When parents
look back on parenthood, they remember feeling what those who are looking forward to it
expect to feel. Few of us are immune to these cheery contemplations. I have a twenty-nineyearold son, and I am absolutely convinced that he is and always has been one of the greatest
sources of joy in my life, having only recently been eclipsed by my two-year-old
granddaughter, who is equally adorable but who has not yet asked me to walk behind her and
pretend we’re unrelated. When people are asked to identify their sources of joy, they do just
what I do: They point to their kids.
Yet if we measure the actual satisfaction of people who have children, a very different
story emerges… . couples generally start out quite happy in their marriages and then become
progressively less satisfied over the course of their lives together, getting close to their
original levels of satisfaction only when their children leave home.17 Despite what we read in
the popular press, the only known symptom of “empty nest syndrome” is increased
smiling.18 Interestingly, this pattern of satisfaction over the life cycle describes women (who
are usually the primary caretakers of children) better than men.19 Careful studies of how
women feel as they go about their daily activities show that they are less happy when taking
care of their children than when eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching
television.20 Indeed, looking after the kids appears to be only slightly more pleasant than
doing housework.
None of this should surprise us. Every parent knows that children are a lot of work — a
lot of really hard work — and although parenting has many rewarding moments, the vast
majority of its moments involve dull and selfless service to people who will take decades to
become even begrudgingly grateful for what we are doing. If parenting is such difficult
business, then why do we have such a rosy view of it? One reason is that we have been
talking on the phone all day with society’s stockholders — our moms and uncles and
personal trainers — who have been transmitting to us an idea that they believe to be true but
whose accuracy is not the cause of its successful transmission. “Children bring happiness” is
a super-replicator. The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate
without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief
that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because
the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it. Indeed, people who
believed that children bring misery and despair — and who thus stopped having them —
would put their belief-transmission network out of business in around fifty years, hence
terminating the belief that terminated them. The Shakers were a utopian farming community
that arose in the 1800s and at one time numbered about six thousand. They approved of
children, but they did not approve of the natural act that creates them. Over the years, their
strict belief in the importance of celibacy caused their network to contract, and today there
are just a few elderly Shakers left, transmitting their doomsday belief to no one but
themselves.
The belief-transmission game is rigged so that we must believe that children and money
bring happiness, regardless of whether such beliefs are true. This doesn’t mean that we
should all now quit our jobs and abandon our families. Rather, it means that while
we believe we are raising children and earning paychecks to increase our share of happiness,
we are actually doing these things for reasons beyond our ken. We are nodes in a social
network that arises and falls by a logic of its own, which is why we continue to toil, continue
to mate, and continue to be surprised when we do not experience all the joy we so gullibly
anticipated.
The Myth of Fingerprints
My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions,
but they never tell me what I should do about it. In one chapter after another, I’ve described
the ways in which imagination fails to provide us with accurate previews of our emotional
futures. I’ve claimed that when we imagine our futures we tend to fill in, leave out, and take
little account of how differently we will think about the future once we actually get there.
I’ve claimed that neither personal experience nor cultural wisdom compensates for
imagination’s shortcomings. I’ve so thoroughly marinated you in the foibles, biases, errors,
and mistakes of the human mind that you may wonder how anyone ever manages to make
toast without buttering their kneecaps. If so, you will be heartened to learn that there is a
simple method by which anyone can make strikingly accurate predictions about how they
will feel in the future. But you may be disheartened to learn that, by and large, no one wants
to use it.
Why do we rely on our imaginations in the first place? Imagination is the poor man’s
wormhole. We can’t do what we’d really like to do — namely, travel through time, pay a
visit to our future selves, and see how happy those selves are — and so we imagine the future
instead of actually going there. But if we cannot travel in the dimensions of time, we can
travel in the dimensions of space, and the chances are pretty good that somewhere in those
other three dimensions there is another human being who is actually experiencing the future
event that we are merely thinking about. Surely we aren’t the first people ever to consider a
move to Cincinnati, a career in motel management, another helping of rhubarb pie, or an
extramarital affair, and for the most part, those who have already tried these things are more
than willing to tell us about them. It is true that when people tell us about their past
experiences (“That ice water wasn’t really so cold” or “I love taking care of my daughter”),
memory’s peccadilloes may render their testimony unreliable. But it is also true that when
people tell us about their current experiences (“How am I feeling right now? I feel like
pulling my arm out of this freezing bucket and sticking my teenager’s head in it instead!”),
they are providing us with the kind of report about their subjective state that is considered the
gold standard of happiness measures. If you believe (as I do) that people can generally say
how they are feeling at the moment they are asked, then one way to make predictions about
our own emotional futures is to find someone who is having the experience we are
contemplating and ask them how they feel. Instead of remembering our past experience in
order to simulate our future experience, perhaps we should simply ask other people to
introspect on their inner states. Perhaps we should give up on remembering and imagining
entirely and use other people as surrogates for our future selves.
This idea sounds all too simple, and I suspect you have an objection to it that goes
something like this: Yes, other people are probably right now experiencing the very things I
am merely contemplating, but I can’t use other people’s experiences as proxies for my own
because those other people are not me. Every human being is as unique as his or her
fingerprints, so it won’t help me much to learn about how others feel in the situations that
I’m facing. Unless these other people are my clones and have had all the same experiences
I’ve had, their reactions and my reactions are bound to differ. I am a walking, talking
idiosyncrasy, and thus I am better off basing my predictions on my somewhat fickle
imagination than on the reports of people whose preferences, tastes, and emotional
proclivities are so radically different from my own. If that’s your objection, then it is a good
one — so good that it will take two steps to dismantle it. First let me prove to you that the
experience of a single randomly selected individual can sometimes provide a better basis for
predicting your future experience than your own imagination can. And then let me show you
why you — and I — find this so difficult to believe.
Finding the Solution
Imagination has three shortcomings, and if you didn’t know that then you may be reading
this bookiv backward. If you did know that, then you also know that imagination’s first
shortcoming is its tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us… . No one can imagine
every feature and consequence of a future event, hence we must consider some and fail to
consider others. The problem is that the features and consequences we fail to consider are
often quite important. You may recall the studyv in which college students were asked to
imagine how they would feel a few days after their school’s football team played a game
against its archrival.21 The results showed that students overestimated the duration of the
game’s emotional impact because when they tried to imagine their future experience, they
imagined their team winning (“The clock will hit zero, we’ll storm the field, everyone will
cheer …”) but failed to imagine what they would be doing afterward (“And then I’ll go home
and study for my final exams”). Because the students were focused on the game, they failed
to imagine how events that happened after the game would influence their happiness. So
what should they have done instead?
They should have abandoned imagination altogether. Consider a study that put people in
a similar predicament and then forced them to abandon their imaginations. In this study, a
group of volunteers (reporters) first received a delicious prize — a gift certificate from a
local ice cream parlor — and then performed a long, boring task in which they counted and
recorded geometric shapes that appeared on a computer screen.22 The reporters then reported
how they felt. Next, a new group of volunteers was told that they would also receive a prize
and do the same boring task. Some of these new volunteers (simulators) were told what the
prize was and were asked to use their imaginations to predict their future feelings. Other
volunteers (surrogators) were not told what the prize was but were instead shown the report
of a randomly selected reporter. Not knowing what the prize was, they couldn’t possibly use
their imaginations to predict their future feelings. Instead, they had to rely on the reporter’s
report. Once all the volunteers had made their predictions, they received the prize, did the
long, boring task, and reported how they actually felt… . Simulators were not as happy as
they thought they would be. Why? Because they failed to imagine how quickly the joy of
receiving a gift certificate would fade when it was followed by a long, boring task. This is
precisely the same mistake that the college-football fans made. But now look at the results
for the surrogators. As you can see, they made extremely accurate predictions of their future
happiness. These surrogators didn’t know what kind of prize they would receive, but they did
know that someone who had received that prize had been less than ecstatic at the conclusion
of the boring task. So they shrugged and reasoned that they too would feel less than ecstatic
at the conclusion of the boring task — and they were right!
Imagination’s second shortcoming is its tendency to project the present onto the
future… . When imagination paints a picture of the future, many of the details are necessarily
missing, and imagination solves this problem by filling in the gaps with details that it
borrows from the present. Anyone who has ever shopped on an empty stomach, vowed to
quit smoking after stubbing out a cigarette, or proposed marriage while on shore
leavevi knows that how we feel now can erroneously influence how we think we’ll feel later.
As it turns out, surrogation can remedy this shortcoming too. In one study, volunteers
(reporters) ate a few potato chips and reported how much they enjoyed them.23 Next, a new
group of volunteers was fed pretzels, peanut-butter cheese crackers, tortilla chips, bread
sticks, and melba toast, which, as you might guess, left them thoroughly stuffed and with
little desire for salty snack foods. These stuffed volunteers were then asked to predict how
much they would enjoy eating a particular food the next day. Some of these stuffed
volunteers (simulators) were told that the food they would eat the next day was potato chips,
and they were asked to use their imaginations to predict how they would feel after eating
them. Other stuffed volunteers (surrogators) were not told what the next day’s food would be
but were instead shown the report of one randomly selected reporter. Because surrogators
didn’t know what the next day’s food would be, they couldn’t use their imaginations to
predict their future enjoyment of it and thus they had to rely on the reporter’s report. Once all
the volunteers had made their predictions, they went away, returned the next day, ate some
potato chips, and reported how much they enjoyed them… . Simulators enjoyed eating the
potato chips more than they thought they would. Why? Because when they made their
predictions they had bellies full of pretzels and crackers. But surrogators — who were
equally full when they made their predictions — relied on the report of someone without a
full belly and hence made much more accurate predictions. It is important to note that the
surrogators accurately predicted their future enjoyment of a food despite the fact that they
didn’t even know what the food was!
Imagination’s third shortcoming is its failure to recognize that things will look different
once they happen — in particular, that bad things will look a whole lot better… . When we
imagine losing a job, for instance, we imagine the painful experience (“The boss will march
into my office, shut the door behind him …”) without also imagining how our psychological
immune systems will transform its meaning (“I’ll come to realize that this was an
opportunity to quit retail sales and follow my true calling as a sculptor”). Can surrogation
remedy this shortcoming? To find out, researchers arranged for some people to have an
unpleasant experience. A group of volunteers (reporters) was told that the experimenter
would flip a coin, and if it came up heads, the volunteer would receive a gift certificate to a
local pizza parlor. The coin was flipped and — oh, so sorry — it came up tails and the
reporters received nothing.24 The reporters then reported how they felt. Next, a new group of
volunteers was told about the coin-flipping game and was asked to predict how they would
feel if the coin came up tails and they didn’t get the pizza gift certificate. Some of these
volunteers (simulators) were told the precise monetary value of the gift certificate, and others
(surrogators) were instead shown the report of one randomly selected reporter. Once the
volunteers had made their predictions, the coin was flipped and — oh, so sorry — came up
tails. The volunteers then reported how they felt. Simulators felt better than they predicted
they’d feel if they lost the coin flip. Why? Because simulators did not realize how quickly
and easily they would rationalize the loss (“Pizza is too fattening, and besides, I don’t like
that restaurant anyway”). But surrogators — who had nothing to go on except the report of
another randomly selected individual — assumed that they wouldn’t feel too bad after losing
the prize and hence made more accurate predictions.
Rejecting the Solution
This trio of studies suggests that when people are deprived of the information that
imagination requires and are thus forced to use others as surrogates, they make remarkably
accurate predictions about their future feelings, which suggests that the best way to predict
our feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today.25 Given the impressive power of
this simple technique, we should expect people to go out of their way to use it. But they
don’t. When an entirely new group of volunteers was told about the three situations I just
described — winning a prize, eating a mystery food, or failing to receive a gift certificate —
and was then asked whether they would prefer to make predictions about their future feelings
based on (a) information about the prize, the food, and the certificate; or (b) information
about how a randomly selected individual felt after winning them, eating them, or losing
them, virtually every volunteer chose the former. If you hadn’t seen the results of these
studies, you’d probably have done the same. If I offered to pay for your dinner at a restaurant
if you could accurately predict how much you were going to enjoy it, would you want to see
the restaurant’s menu or some randomly selected diner’s review? If you are like most people,
you would prefer to see the menu, and if you are like most people, you would end up buying
your own dinner. Why?
If you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like most people.
Because if you are like most people, then like most people, you don’t know you’re like
most people. Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the
most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t see herself as average. Most
students see themselves as more intelligent than the average student,26 most business
managers see themselves as more competent than the average business manager,27 and most
football players see themselves as having better “football sense” than their
teammates.28 Ninety percent of motorists consider themselves to be safer-than-average
drivers,29 and 94 percent of college professors consider themselves to be better-than-average
teachers.30 Ironically, the bias toward seeing ourselves as better than average causes us to see
ourselves as less biased than average too.31 As one research team concluded, “Most of us
appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting,
fair-minded, and healthy — not to mention more attractive — than the average person.”32
This tendency to think of ourselves as better than others is not necessarily a manifestation
of our unfettered narcissism but may instead be an instance of a more general tendency to
think of ourselves as different from others — often for better but sometimes for worse. When
people are asked about generosity, they claim to perform a greater number of generous acts
than others do; but when they are asked about selfishness, they claim to perform a greater
number of selfish acts than others do.33 When people are asked about their ability to perform
an easy task, such as driving a car or riding a bike, they rate themselves as better than others;
but when they are asked about their ability to perform a difficult task, such as juggling or
playing chess, they rate themselves as worse than others.34 We don’t always see ourselves
as superior, but we almost always see ourselves as unique. Even when we do precisely what
others do, we tend to think that we’re doing it for unique reasons. For instance, we tend to
attribute other people’s choices to features of the chooser (“Phil picked this class because
he’s one of those literary types”), but we tend to attribute our own choices to features of the
options (“But I picked it because it was easier than economics”).35 We recognize that our
decisions are influenced by social norms (“I was too embarrassed to raise my hand in class
even though I was terribly confused”), but fail to recognize that others’ decisions were
similarly influenced (“No one else raised a hand because no one else was as confused as I
was”).36 We know that our choices sometimes reflect our aversions (“I voted for Kerry
because I couldn’t stand Bush”), but we assume that other people’s choices reflect their
appetites (“If Rebecca voted for Kerry, then she must have liked him”).37 The list of
differences is long but the conclusion to be drawn from it is short: The self considers itself to
be a very special person.38
What makes us think we’re so darned special? Three things, at least. First, even if we
aren’t special, the way we know ourselves is. We are the only people in the world whom we
can know from the inside. We experience our own thoughts and feelings but must infer that
other people are experiencing theirs. We all trust that behind those eyes and inside those
skulls, our friends and neighbors are having subjective experiences very much like our own,
but that trust is an article of faith and not the palpable, self-evident truth that our own
subjective experiences constitute. There is a difference between making love and reading
about it, and it is the same difference that distinguishes our knowledge of our own mental
lives from our knowledge of everyone else’s. Because we know ourselves and others by such
different means, we gather very different kinds and amounts of information. In every waking
moment we monitor the steady stream of thoughts and feelings that runs through our heads,
but we only monitor other people’s words and deeds, and only when they are in our
company. One reason why we seem so special, then, is that we learn about ourselves in such
a special way.
The second reason is that we enjoy thinking of ourselves as special. Most of us want to fit
in well with our peers, but we don’t want to fit in too well.39 We prize our unique identities,
and research shows that when people are made to feel too similar to others, their moods
quickly sour and they try to distance and distinguish themselves in a variety of ways.40 If
you’ve ever shown up at a party and found someone else wearing exactly the same dress or
necktie that you were wearing, then you know how unsettling it is to share the room with an
unwanted twin whose presence temporarily diminishes your sense of individuality. Because
we value our uniqueness, it isn’t surprising that we tend to overestimate it.
The third reason why we tend to overestimate our uniqueness is that we tend to
overestimate everyone’s uniqueness — that is, we tend to think of people as more different
from one another than they actually are. Let’s face it: All people are si milar in some ways
and different in others. The psychologists, biologists, economists, and sociologists who are
searching for universal laws of human behavior naturally care about the similarities, but the rest
of us care mainly about the differences. Social life involves selecting particular individuals to be
our sexual partners, business partners, bowling partners, and more. That task requires that we
focus on the things that distinguish one person from another and not on the things that all people
share, which is why personal ads are much more likely to mention the advertiser’s love of ballet
than his love of oxygen. A penchant for respiration explains a great deal about human behavior
— for example, why people live on land, become ill at high altitudes, have lungs, resist
suffocation, love trees, and so on. It surely explains more than does a person’s penchant for
ballet. But it does nothing to distinguish one person from another, and thus for ordinary folks
who are in the ordinary business of selecting others for commerce, conversation, or copulation,
the penchant for air is stunningly irrelevant. Individual similarities are vast, but we don’t care
much about them because they don’t help us do what we are here on earth to do, namely,
distinguish Jack from Jill and Jill from Jennifer. As such, these individual similarities are an
inconspicuous backdrop against which a small number of relatively minor individual differences
stand out in bold relief.
Because we spend so much time searching for, attending to, thinking about, and
remembering these differences, we tend to overestimate their magnitude and frequency, and thus
end up thinking of people as more varied than they actually are. If you spent all day sorting
grapes into different shapes, colors, and kinds, you’d become one of those annoying grapeophiles
who talks endlessly about the nuances of flavor and the permutations of texture. You’d come to
think of grapes as infinitely varied, and you’d forget that almost all of the
really important information about a grape can be deduced from the simple fact of its grapehood.
Our belief in the variability of others and in the uniqueness of the self is especially powerful
when it comes to emotion.41 Because we can feel our own emotions but must infer the emotions
of others by watching their faces and listening to their voices, we often have the impression that
others don’t experience the same intensity of emotion that we do, which is why we expect others
to recognize our feelings even when we can’t recognize theirs.42 This sense of emotional
uniqueness starts early. When kindergarteners are asked how they and others would feel in a
variety of situations, they expect to experience unique emotions (“Billy would be sad but I
wouldn’t”) and they provide unique reasons for experiencing them (“I’d tell myself that the
hamster was in heaven, but Billy would just cry”).43 When adults make these same kinds of
predictions, they do just the same thing.44
Our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why
we refuse to use others as surrogates. After all, surrogation is only useful when we can count on
a surrogate to react to an event roughly as we would, and if we believe that people’s emotional
reactions are more varied than they actually are, then surrogation will seem less useful to us than
it actually is. The irony, of course, is that surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict
one’s future emotions, but because we don’t realize just how similar we all are, we reject this
reliable method and rely instead on our imaginations, as flawed and fallible as they may be.
Onward
Despite its watery connotation, the word hogwash refers to the feeding — and not to the bathing
— of pigs. Hogwash is something that pigs eat, that pigs like, and that pigs need. Farmers
provide pigs with hogwash because without it, pigs get grumpy. The word hogwash also refers to
the falsehoods people tell one another. Like the hogwash that farmers feed their pigs, the
hogwash that our friends and teachers and parents feed us is meant to make us happy; but unlike
hogwash of the porcine variety, human hogwash does not always achieve its end. As we have
seen, ideas can flourish if they preserve the social systems that allow them to be transmitted.
Because individuals don’t usually feel that it is their personal duty to preserve social systems,
these ideas must disguise themselves as prescriptions for individual happiness. We might expect
that after spending some time in the world, our experiences would debunk these ideas, but it
doesn’t always work that way. To learn from our experience we must remember it, and for a
variety of reasons, memory is a faithless friend. Practice and coaching get us out of our diapers
and into our britches, but they are not enough to get us out of our presents and into our futures.
What’s so ironic about this predicament is that the information we need to make accurate
predictions of our emotional futures is right under our noses, but we don’t seem to recognize its
aroma. It doesn’t always make sense to heed what people tell us when they communicate their
beliefs about happiness, but it does make sense to observe how happy they are in different
circumstances. Alas, we think of ourselves as unique entities — minds unlike any others — and
thus we often reject the lessons that the emotional experience of others has to teach us.
Here is the link with the article
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html
What is it about 20-somethings
Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?
This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to
launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children
moving back in with their parents — “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William
Shatner as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on
his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his
Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The
New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his
new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling
his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In
the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry,
annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?
It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving
back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall.
It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one
knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and
women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built
on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow
up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions
supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers,
make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off
course, as young people remain untethered to romantic partners or to
permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling,
avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or
temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the
beginning of adult life.
The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of
people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move
back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of
seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Twothirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being
married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first
marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for
women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for
men, five years in a little more than a generation.
We’re in the thick of what one sociologist calls “the changing timetable for
adulthood.” Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as
marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming
financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of
women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all
five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000, according to data from the
United States Census Bureau, fewer than half of the women and one-third of
the men had done so. A Canadian study reported that a typical 30-year-old in
2001 had completed the same number of milestones as a 25-year-old in the
early ’70s.
The whole idea of milestones, of course, is something of an anachronism; it
implies a lockstep march toward adulthood that is rare these days. Kids don’t
shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward
adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace. Some never achieve all five
milestones, including those who are single or childless by choice, or unable to
marry even if they wanted to because they’re gay. Others reach the milestones
completely out of order, advancing professionally before committing to a
monogamous relationship, having children young and marrying later, leaving
school to go to work and returning to school long after becoming financially
secure.
Even if some traditional milestones are never reached, one thing is clear:
Getting to what we would generally call adulthood is happening later than
ever. But why? That’s the subject of lively debate among policy makers and
academics. To some, what we’re seeing is a transient epiphenomenon, the
byproduct of cultural and economic forces. To others, the longer road to
adulthood signifies something deep, durable and maybe better-suited to our
neurological hard-wiring. What we’re seeing, they insist, is the dawning of a
new life stage — a stage that all of us need to adjust to.
JEFFREY JENSEN ARNETT, a psychology professor at Clark University
in Worcester, Mass., is leading the movement to view the 20s as a distinct life
stage, which he calls “emerging adulthood.” He says what is happening now is
analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic
changes helped create adolescence — a stage we take for granted but one that
had to be recognized by psychologists, accepted by society and
accommodated by institutions that served the young. Similar changes at the
turn of the 21st century have laid the groundwork for another new stage,
Arnett says, between the age of 18 and the late 20s. Among the cultural
changes he points to that have led to “emerging adulthood” are the need for
more education to survive in an information-based economy; fewer entrylevel jobs even after all that schooling; young people feeling less rush to
marry because of the general acceptance of premarital sex, cohabitation and
birth control; and young women feeling less rush to have babies given their
wide range of career options and their access to assisted reproductive
technology if they delay pregnancy beyond their most fertile years.
Just as adolescence has its particular psychological profile, Arnett says, so
does emerging adulthood: identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling
in-between and a rather poetic characteristic he calls “a sense of possibilities.”
A few of these, especially identity exploration, are part of adolescence too, but
they take on new depth and urgency in the 20s. The stakes are higher when
people are approaching the age when options tend to close off and lifelong
commitments must be made. Arnett calls it “the age 30 deadline.”
The issue of whether emerging adulthood is a new stage is being debated
most forcefully among scholars, in particular psychologists and sociologists.
But its resolution has broader implications. Just look at what happened for
teenagers. It took some effort, a century ago, for psychologists to make the
case that adolescence was a new developmental stage. Once that happened,
social institutions were forced to adapt: education, health care, social services
and the law all changed to address the particular needs of 12- to 18-year-olds.
An understanding of the developmental profile of adolescence led, for
instance, to the creation of junior high schools in the early 1900s, separating
seventh and eighth graders from the younger children in what used to be
called primary school. And it led to the recognition that teenagers between 14
and 18, even though they were legally minors, were mature enough to make
their own choice of legal guardian in the event of their parents’ deaths. If
emerging adulthood is an analogous stage, analogous changes are in the
wings.
But what would it look like to extend some of the special status of adolescents
to young people in their 20s? Our uncertainty about this question is reflected
in our scattershot approach to markers of adulthood. People can vote at 18,
but in some states they don’t age out of foster care until 21. They can join the
military at 18, but they can’t drink until 21. They can drive at 16, but they
can’t rent a car until 25 without some hefty surcharges. If they are full-time
students, the Internal Revenue Service considers them dependents until 24;
those without health insurance will soon be able to stay on their parents’
plans even if they’re not in school until age 26, or up to 30 in some states.
Parents have no access to their child’s college records if the child is over 18,
but parents’ income is taken into account when the child applies for financial
aid up to age 24. We seem unable to agree when someone is old enough to
take on adult responsibilities. But we’re pretty sure it’s not simply a matter of
age.
If society decides to protect these young people or treat them differently from
fully grown adults, how can we do this without becoming all the things that
grown children resist — controlling, moralizing, paternalistic? Young people
spend their lives lumped into age-related clusters — that’s the basis of K-12
schooling — but as they move through their 20s, they diverge. Some 25-yearolds are married homeowners with good jobs and a couple of kids; others are
still living with their parents and working at transient jobs, or not working at
all. Does that mean we extend some of the protections and special status of
adolescence to all people in their 20s? To some of them? Which ones?
Decisions like this matter, because failing to protect and support vulnerable
young people can lead them down the wrong path at a critical moment, the
one that can determine all subsequent paths. But overprotecting and
oversupporting them can sometimes make matters worse, turning the
“changing timetable of adulthood” into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The more profound question behind the scholarly intrigue is the one that
really captivates parents: whether the prolongation of this unsettled time of
life is a good thing or a bad thing. With life spans stretching into the ninth
decade, is it better for young people to experiment in their 20s before making
choices they’ll have to live with for more than half a century? Or is adulthood
now so malleable, with marriage and employment options constantly being
reassessed, that young people would be better off just getting started on
something, or else they’ll never catch up, consigned to remain always a few
steps behind the early bloomers? Is emerging adulthood a rich and varied
period for self-discovery, as Arnett says it is? Or is it just another term for
self-indulgence?
THE DISCOVERY OF adolescence is generally dated to 1904, with the
publication of the massive study “Adolescence,” by G. Stanley Hall, a
prominent psychologist and first president of the American Psychological
Association. Hall attributed the new stage to social changes at the turn of the
20th century. Child-labor laws kept children under 16 out of the work force,
and universal education laws kept them in secondary school, thus prolonging
the period of dependence — a dependence that allowed them to address
psychological tasks they might have ignored when they took on adult roles
straight out of childhood. Hall, the first president of Clark University — the
same place, interestingly enough, where Arnett now teaches — described
adolescence as a time of “storm and stress,” filled with emotional upheaval,
sorrow and rebelliousness. He cited the “curve of despondency” that “starts at
11, rises steadily and rapidly till 15 . . . then falls steadily till 23,” and
described other characteristics of adolescence, including an increase in
sensation seeking, greater susceptibility to media influences (which in 1904
mostly meant “flash literature” and “penny dreadfuls”) and overreliance on
peer relationships. Hall’s book was flawed, but it marked the beginning of the
scientific study of adolescence and helped lead to its eventual acceptance as a
distinct stage with its own challenges, behaviors and biological profile.
In the 1990s, Arnett began to suspect that something similar was taking place
with young people in their late teens and early 20s. He was teaching human
development and family studies at the University of Missouri, studying
college-age students, both at the university and in the community around
Columbia, Mo. He asked them questions about their lives and their
expectations like, “Do you feel you have reached adulthood?”
“I was in my early- to mid-30s myself, and I remember thinking, They’re not
a thing like me,” Arnett told me when we met last spring in Worcester. “I
realized that there was something special going on.” The young people he
spoke to weren’t experiencing the upending physical changes that accompany
adolescence, but as an age cohort they did seem to have a psychological
makeup different from that of people just a little bit younger or a little bit
older. This was not how most psychologists were thinking about development
at the time, when the eight-stage model of the psychologist Erik Erikson was
in vogue. Erikson, one of the first to focus on psychological development past
childhood, divided adulthood into three stages — young (roughly ages 20 to
45), middle (about ages 45 to 65) and late (all the rest) — and defined them
by the challenges that individuals in a particular stage encounter and must
resolve before moving on to the next stage. In young adulthood, according to
his model, the primary psychological challenge is “intimacy versus isolation,”
by which Erikson meant deciding whether to commit to a lifelong intimate
relationship and choosing the person to commit to.
But Arnett said “young adulthood” was too broad a term to apply to a 25-year
span that included both him and his college students. The 20s are something
different from the 30s and 40s, he remembered thinking. And while he
agreed that the struggle for intimacy was one task of this period, he said there
were other critical tasks as well.
Arnett and I were discussing the evolution of his thinking over lunch at BABA
Sushi, a quiet restaurant near his office where he goes so often he knows the
sushi chefs by name. He is 53, very tall and wiry, with clipped steel-gray hair
and ice-blue eyes, an intense, serious man. He describes himself as a late
bloomer, a onetime emerging adult before anyone had given it a name. After
graduating from Michigan State University in 1980, he spent two years
playing guitar in bars and restaurants and experimented with girlfriends,
drugs and general recklessness before going for his doctorate in
developmental psychology at the University of Virginia. By 1986 he had his
first academic job at Oglethorpe University, a small college in Atlanta. There
he met his wife, Lene Jensen, the school’s smartest psych major, who stunned
Arnett when she came to his office one day in 1989, shortly after she
graduated, and asked him out on a date. Jensen earned a doctorate in
psychology, too, and she also teaches at Clark. She and Arnett have 10-yearold twins, a boy and a girl.
Arnett spent time at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago
before moving to the University of Missouri in 1992, beginning his study of
young men and women in the college town of Columbia, gradually
broadening his sample to include New Orleans, Los Angeles and San
Francisco. He deliberately included working-class young people as well as
those who were well off, those who had never gone to college as well as those
who were still in school, those who were supporting themselves as well as
those whose bills were being paid by their parents. A little more than half of
his sample was white, 18 percent African-American, 16 percent AsianAmerican and 14 percent Latino.
More than 300 interviews and 250 survey responses persuaded Arnett that he
was onto something new. This was the era of the Gen X slacker, but Arnett
felt that his findings applied beyond one generation. He wrote them up in
2000 in American Psychologist, the first time he laid out his theory of
“emerging adulthood.” According to Google Scholar, which keeps track of
such things, the article has been cited in professional books and journals
roughly 1,700 times. This makes it, in the world of academia, practically viral.
At the very least, the citations indicate that Arnett had come up with a useful
term for describing a particular cohort; at best, that he offered a whole new
way of thinking about them.
DURING THE PERIOD he calls emerging adulthood, Arnett says that
young men and women are more self-focused than at any other time of life,
less certain about the future and yet also more optimistic, no matter what
their economic background. This is where the “sense of possibilities” comes
in, he says; they have not yet tempered their idealistic visions of what awaits.
“The dreary, dead-end jobs, the bitter divorces, the disappointing and
disrespectful children . . . none of them imagine that this is what the future
holds for them,” he wrote. Ask them if they agree with the statement “I am
very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life,” and 96 percent
of them will say yes. But despite elements that are exciting, even exhilarating,
about being this age, there is a downside, too: dread, frustration, uncertainty,
a sense of not quite understanding the rules of the game. More than positive
or negative feelings, what Arnett heard most often was ambivalence —
beginning with his finding that 60 percent of his subjects told him they felt
like both grown-ups and not-quite-grown-ups.
Some scientists would argue that this ambivalence reflects what is going on in
the brain, which is also both grown-up and not-quite-grown-up.
Neuroscientists once thought the brain stops growing shortly after puberty,
but now they know it keeps maturing well into the 20s. This new
understanding comes largely from a longitudinal study of brain development
sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, which started following
nearly 5,000 children at ages 3 to 16 (the average age at enrollment was about
10). The scientists found the children’s brains were not fully mature until at
least 25. “In retrospect I wouldn’t call it shocking, but it was at the time,” Jay
Giedd, the director of the study, told me. “The only people who got this right
were the car-rental companies.”
When the N.I.M.H. study began in 1991, Giedd said he and his colleagues
expected to stop when the subjects turned 16. “We figured that by 16 their
bodies were pretty big physically,” he said. But every time the children
returned, their brains were found still to be changing. The scientists extended
the end date of the study to age 18, then 20, then 22. The subjects’ brains
were still changing even then. Tellingly, the most significant changes took
place in the prefrontal cortex and cerebellum, the regions involved in
emotional control and higher-order cognitive function.
As the brain matures, one thing that happens is the pruning of the synapses.
Synaptic pruning does not occur willy-nilly; it depends largely on how any
one brain pathway is used. By cutting off unused pathways, the brain
eventually settles into a structure that’s most efficient for the owner of that
brain, creating well-worn grooves for the pathways that person uses most.
Synaptic pruning intensifies after rapid brain-cell proliferation during
childhood and again in the period that encompasses adolescence and the 20s.
It is the mechanism of “use it or lose it”: the brains we have are shaped largely
in response to the demands made of them.
We have come to accept the idea that environmental influences in the first
three years of life have long-term consequences for cognition, emotional
control, attention and the like. Is it time to place a similar emphasis, with
hopes for a similar outcome, on enriching the cognitive environment of
people in their 20s?
Photo
N.I.M.H. scientists also found a time lag between the growth of the limbic
system, where emotions originate, and of the prefrontal cortex, which
manages those emotions. The limbic system explodes during puberty, but the
prefrontal cortex keeps maturing for another 10 years. Giedd said it is logical
to suppose — and for now, neuroscientists have to make a lot of logical
suppositions — that when the limbic system is fully active but the cortex is
still being built, emotions might outweigh rationality. “The prefrontal part is
the part that allows you to control your impulses, come up with a long-range
strategy, answer the question ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ ” he told
me. “That weighing of the future keeps changing into the 20s and 30s.”
Among study subjects who enrolled as children, M.R.I. scans have been done
so far only to age 25, so scientists have to make another logical supposition
about what happens to the brain in the late 20s, the 30s and beyond. Is it
possible that the brain just keeps changing and pruning, for years and years?
“Guessing from the shape of the growth curves we have,” Giedd’s colleague
Philip Shaw wrote in an e-mail message, “it does seem that much of the gray
matter,” where synaptic pruning takes place, “seems to have completed its
most dramatic structural change” by age 25. For white matter, where
insulation that helps impulses travel faster continues to form, “it does look as
if the curves are still going up, suggesting continued growth” after age 25, he
wrote, though at a slower rate than before.
None of this is new, of course; the brains of young people have always been
works in progress, even when we didn’t have sophisticated scanning
machinery to chart it precisely. Why, then, is the youthful brain only now
arising as an explanation for why people in their 20s are seeming a bit
unfinished? Maybe there’s an analogy to be found in the hierarchy of needs, a
theory put forth in the 1940s by the psychologist Abraham Maslow.
According to Maslow, people can pursue more elevated goals only after their
basic needs of food, shelter and sex have been met. What if the brain has its
own hierarchy of needs? When people are forced to adopt adult
responsibilities early, maybe they just do what they have to do, whether or
not their brains are ready. Maybe it’s only now, when young people are
allowed to forestall adult obligations without fear of public censure, that the
rate of societal maturation can finally fall into better sync with the maturation
of the brain.
Cultural expectations might also reinforce the delay. The “changing timetable
for adulthood” has, in many ways, become internalized by 20-somethings and
their parents alike. Today young people don’t expect to marry until their late
20s, don’t expect to start a family until their 30s, don’t expect to be on track
for a rewarding career until much later than their parents were. So they make
decisions about their futures that reflect this wider time horizon. Many of
them would not be ready to take on the trappings of adulthood any earlier
even if the opportunity arose; they haven’t braced themselves for it.
Nor do parents expect their children to grow up right away — and they might
not even want them to. Parents might regret having themselves jumped into
marriage or a career and hope for more considered choices for their children.
Or they might want to hold on to a reassuring connection with their children
as the kids leave home. If they were “helicopter parents” — a term that
describes heavily invested parents who hover over their children, swooping
down to take charge and solve problems at a moment’s notice — they might
keep hovering and problem-solving long past the time when their children
should be solving problems on their own. This might, in a strange way, be
part of what keeps their grown children in the limbo between adolescence
and adulthood. It can be hard sometimes to tease out to what extent a child
doesn’t quite want to grow up and to what extent a parent doesn’t quite want
to let go.
IT IS A BIG DEAL IN developmental psychology to declare the existence of
a new stage of life, and Arnett has devoted the past 10 years to making his
case. Shortly after his American Psychologist article appeared in 2000, he
and Jennifer Lynn Tanner, a developmental psychologist at Rutgers
University, convened the first conference of what they later called the Society
for the Study of Emerging Adulthood. It was held in 2003 at Harvard with an
attendance of 75; there have been three more since then, and last year’s
conference, in Atlanta, had more than 270 attendees. In 2004 Arnett
published a book, “Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road From the Late
Teens Through the Twenties,” which is still in print and selling well. In 2006
he and Tanner published an edited volume, “Emerging Adults in America:
Coming of Age in the 21st Century,” aimed at professionals and academics.
Arnett’s college textbook, “Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural
Approach,” has been in print since 2000 and is now in its fourth edition. Next
year he says he hopes to publish another book, this one for the parents of 20somethings.
If all Arnett’s talk about emerging adulthood sounds vaguely familiar . . . well,
it should. Forty years ago, an article appeared in The American Scholar that
declared “a new stage of life” for the period between adolescence and young
adulthood. This was 1970, when the oldest members of the baby boom
generation — the parents of today’s 20-somethings — were 24. Young people
of the day “can’t seem to ‘settle down,’ ” wrote the Yale psychologist Kenneth
Keniston. He called the new stage of life “youth.”
Keniston’s description of “youth” presages Arnett’s description of “emerging
adulthood” a generation later. In the late ’60s, Keniston wrote that there was
“a growing minority of post-adolescents [who] have not settled the questions
whose answers once defined adulthood: questions of relationship to the
existing society, questions of vocation, questions of social role and lifestyle.”
Whereas once, such aimlessness was seen only in the “unusually creative or
unusually disturbed,” he wrote, it was becoming more common and more
ordinary in the baby boomers of 1970. Among the salient characteristics of
“youth,” Keniston wrote, were “pervasive ambivalence toward self and
society,” “the feeling of absolute freedom, of living in a world of pure
possibilities” and “the enormous value placed upon change, transformation
and movement” — all characteristics that Arnett now ascribes to “emerging
adults.”
Arnett readily acknowledges his debt to Keniston; he mentions him in almost
everything he has written about emerging adulthood. But he considers
the ’60s a unique moment, when young people were rebellious and alienated
in a way they’ve never been before or since. And Keniston’s views never quite
took off, Arnett says, because “youth” wasn’t a very good name for it. He has
called the label “ambiguous and confusing,” not nearly as catchy as his own
“emerging adulthood.”
For whatever reason Keniston’s terminology faded away, it’s revealing to read
his old article and hear echoes of what’s going on with kids today. He was
describing the parents of today’s young people when they themselves were
young — and amazingly, they weren’t all that different from their own
children now. Keniston’s article seems a lovely demonstration of the eternal
cycle of life, the perennial conflict between the generations, the gradual
resolution of those conflicts. It’s reassuring, actually, to think of it as
recursive, to imagine that there must always be a cohort of 20-somethings
who take their time settling down, just as there must always be a cohort of
50-somethings who worry about it.
KENISTON CALLED IT youth, Arnett calls it emerging adulthood;
whatever it’s called, the delayed transition has been observed for years. But it
can be in fullest flower only when the young person has some other,
nontraditional means of support — which would seem to make the delay
something of a luxury item. That’s the impression you get reading Arnett’s
case histories in his books and articles, or the essays in “20 Something
Manifesto,” an anthology edited by a Los Angeles writer named Christine
Hassler. “It’s somewhat terrifying,” writes a 25-year-old named Jennifer, “to
think about all the things I’m supposed to be doing in order to ‘get
somewhere’ successful: ‘Follow your passions, live your dreams, take risks,
network with the right people, find mentors, be financially responsible,
volunteer, work, think about or go to grad school, fall in love and maintain
personal well-being, mental health and nutrition.’ When is there time to just
be and enjoy?” Adds a 24-year-old from Virginia: “There is pressure to make
decisions that will form the foundation for the rest of your life in your 20s.
It’s almost as if having a range of limited options would be easier.”
While the complaints of these young people are heartfelt, they are also the
complaints of the privileged. Julie, a 23-year-old New Yorker and contributor
to “20 Something Manifesto,” is apparently aware of this. She was coddled
her whole life, treated to French horn lessons and summer camp, told she
could do anything. “It is a double-edged sword,” she writes, “because on the
one hand I am so blessed with my experiences and endless options, but on the
other hand, I still feel like a child. I feel like my job isn’t real because I am not
where my parents were at my age. Walking home, in the shoes my father
bought me, I still feel I have yet to grow up.”
Photo
CreditBon Duke
Despite these impressions, Arnett insists that emerging adulthood is not
limited to young persons of privilege and that it is not simply a period of selfindulgence. He takes pains in “Emerging Adulthood” to describe some case
histories of young men and women from hard-luck backgrounds who use the
self-focus and identity exploration of their 20s to transform their lives.
One of these is the case history of Nicole, a 25-year-old African-American
who grew up in a housing project in Oakland, Calif. At age 6, Nicole, the
eldest, was forced to take control of the household after her mother’s mental
collapse. By 8, she was sweeping stores and baby-sitting for money to help
keep her three siblings fed and housed. “I made a couple bucks and helped
my mother out, helped my family out,” she told Arnett. She managed to
graduate from high school, but with low grades, and got a job as a
receptionist at a dermatology clinic. She moved into her own apartment, took
night classes at community college and started to excel. “I needed to
experience living out of my mother’s home in order to study,” she said.
In his book, Arnett presents Nicole as a symbol of all the young people from
impoverished backgrounds for whom “emerging adulthood represents an
opportunity — maybe a last opportunity — to turn one’s life around.” This is
the stage where someone like Nicole can escape an abusive or dysfunctional
family and finally pursue her own dreams. Nicole’s dreams are powerful —
one course away from an associate degree, she plans to go on for a bachelor’s
and then a Ph.D. in psychology — but she has not really left her family
behind; few people do. She is still supporting her mother and siblings, which
is why she works full time even though her progress through school would be
quicker if she found a part-time job. Is it only a grim pessimist like me who
sees how many roadblocks there will be on the way to achieving those dreams
and who wonders what kind of freewheeling emerging adulthood she is
supposed to be having?
Of course, Nicole’s case is not representative of society as a whole. And many
parents — including those who can’t really afford it — continue to help their
kids financially long past the time they expected to. Two years ago Karen
Fingerman, a developmental psychologist at Purdue University, asked
parents of grown children whether they provided significant assistance to
their sons or daughters. Assistance included giving their children money or
help with everyday tasks (practical assistance) as well as advice,
companionship and an attentive ear. Eighty-six percent said they had
provided advice in the previous month; less than half had done so in 1988.
Two out of three parents had given a son or daughter practical assistance in
the previous month; in 1988, only one in three had.
Fingerman took solace in her findings; she said it showed that parents stay
connected to their grown children, and she suspects that both parties get
something out of it. The survey questions, after all, referred not only to
dispensing money but also to offering advice, comfort and friendship. And
another of Fingerman’s studies suggests that parents’ sense of well-being
depends largely on how close they are to their grown children and how their
children are faring — objective support for the adage that you’re only as
happy as your unhappiest child. But the expectation that young men and
women won’t quite be able to make ends meet on their own, and that parents
should be the ones to help bridge the gap, places a terrible burden on parents
who might be worrying about their own job security, trying to care for their
aging parents or grieving as their retirement plans become more and more of
a pipe dream.
This dependence on Mom and Dad also means that during the 20s the rift
between rich and poor becomes entrenched. According to data gathered by
the Network on Transitions to Adulthood, a research consortium supported
by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, American parents
give an average of 10 percent of their income to their 18- to 21-year-old
children. This percentage is basically the same no matter the family’s total
income, meaning that upper-class kids tend to get more than working-class
ones. And wealthier kids have other, less obvious, advantages. When they go
to four-year colleges or universities, they get supervised dormitory housing,
health care and alumni networks not available at community colleges. And
they often get a leg up on their careers by using parents’ contacts to help land
an entry-level job — or by using parents as a financial backup when they want
to take an interesting internship that doesn’t pay.
“You get on a pathway, and pathways have momentum,” Jennifer Lynn
Tanner of Rutgers told me. “In emerging adulthood, if you spend this time
exploring and you get yourself on a pathway that really fits you, then there’s
going to be this snowball effect of finding the right fit, the right partner, the
right job, the right place to live. The less you have at first, the less you’re
going to get this positive effect compounded over time. You’re not going to
have the same acceleration.” EVEN ARNETT ADMITS that not every
young person goes through a period of “emerging adulthood.” It’s rare in the
developing world, he says, where people have to grow up fast, and it’s often
skipped in the industrialized world by the people who marry early, by teenage
mothers forced to grow up, by young men or women who go straight from
high school to whatever job is available without a chance to dabble until they
find the perfect fit. Indeed, the majority of humankind would seem to not go
through it at all. The fact that emerging adulthood is not universal is one of
the strongest arguments against Arnett’s claim that it is a new developmental
stage. If emerging adulthood is so important, why is it even possible to skip
it?
“The core idea of classical stage theory is that all people — underscore ‘all’ —
pass through a series of qualitatively different periods in an invariant and
universal sequence in stages that can’t be skipped or reordered,” Richard
Lerner, Bergstrom chairman in applied developmental science at Tufts
University, told me. Lerner is a close personal friend of Arnett’s; he and his
wife, Jacqueline, who is also a psychologist, live 20 miles from Worcester,
and they have dinner with Arnett and his wife on a regular basis.
“I think the world of Jeff Arnett,” Lerner said. “I think he is a smart,
passionate person who is doing great work — not only a smart and productive
scholar, but one of the nicest people I ever met in my life.”
No matter how much he likes and admires Arnett, however, Lerner says his
friend has ignored some of the basic tenets of developmental psychology.
According to classical stage theory, he told me, “you must develop what
you’re supposed to develop when you’re supposed to develop it or you’ll never
adequately develop it.”
When I asked Arnett what happens to people who don’t have an emerging
adulthood, he said it wasn’t necessarily a big deal. They might face its
developmental tasks — identity exploration, self-focus, experimentation in
love, work and worldview — at a later time, maybe as a midlife crisis, or they
might never face them at all, he said. It depends partly on why they missed
emerging adulthood in the first place, whether it was by circumstance or by
choice.
Photo
CreditAnnie Ling
No, said Lerner, that’s not the way it works. To qualify as a developmental
stage, emerging adulthood must be both universal and essential. “If you don’t
develop a skill at the right stage, you’ll be working the rest of your life to
develop it when you should be moving on,” he said. “The rest of your
development will be unfavorably altered.” The fact that Arnett can be so
casual about the heterogeneity of emerging adulthood and its existence in
some cultures but not in others — indeed, even in some people but not in
their neighbors or friends — is what undermines, for many scholars, his
insistence that it’s a new life stage.
Why does it matter? Because if the delay in achieving adulthood is just a
temporary aberration caused by passing social mores and economic gloom,
it’s something to struggle through for now, maybe feeling a little sorry for the
young people who had the misfortune to come of age in a recession. But if it’s
a true life stage, we need to start rethinking our definition of normal
development and to create systems of education, health care and social
supports that take the new stage into account.
The Network on Transitions to Adulthood has been issuing reports about
young people since it was formed in 1999 and often ends up recommending
more support for 20-somethings. But more of what, exactly? There aren’t
institutions set up to serve people in this specific age range; social services
from a developmental perspective tend to disappear after adolescence. But
it’s possible to envision some that might address the restlessness and mobility
that Arnett says are typical at this stage and that might make the
experimentation of “emerging adulthood” available to more young people.
How about expanding programs like City Year, in which 17- to 24-year-olds
from diverse backgrounds spend a year mentoring inner-city children in
exchange for a stipend, health insurance, child care, cellphone service and a
$5,350 education award? Or a federal program in which a governmentsponsored savings account is created for every newborn, to be cashed in at
age 21 to support a year’s worth of travel, education or volunteer work — a
version of the “baby bonds” program that Hillary Clinton mentioned during
her 2008 primary campaign? Maybe we can encourage a kind of socially
sanctioned “rumspringa,” the temporary moratorium from social
responsibilities some Amish offer their young people to allow them to
experiment before settling down. It requires only a bit of ingenuity — as well
as some societal forbearance and financial commitment — to think of ways to
expand some of the programs that now work so well for the elite, like the
Fulbright fellowship or the Peace Corps, to make the chance for temporary
service and self-examination available to a wider range of young people.
A century ago, it was helpful to start thinking of adolescents as engaged in the
work of growing up rather than as merely lazy or rebellious. Only then could
society recognize that the educational, medical, mental-health and socialservice needs of this group were unique and that investing in them would
have a payoff in the future. Twenty-somethings are engaged in work, too,
even if it looks as if they are aimless or failing to pull their weight, Arnett
says. But it’s a reflection of our collective attitude toward this period that we
devote so few resources to keeping them solvent and granting them some
measure of security.
THE KIND OF SERVICES that might be created if emerging adulthood is
accepted as a life stage can be seen during a visit to Yellowbrick, a residential
program in Evanston, Ill., that calls itself the only psychiatric treatment
facility for emerging adults. “Emerging adults really do have unique
developmental tasks to focus on,” said Jesse Viner, Yellowbrick’s executive
medical director. Viner started Yellowbrick in 2005, when he was working in
a group psychiatric practice in Chicago and saw the need for a different way
to treat this cohort. He is a soft-spoken man who looks like an accountant and
sounds like a New Age prophet, peppering his conversation with phrases like
“helping to empower their agency.”
“Agency” is a tricky concept when parents are paying the full cost of
Yellowbrick’s comprehensive residential program, which comes to $21,000 a
month and is not always covered by insurance. Staff members are aware of
the paradox of encouraging a child to separate from Mommy and Daddy
when it’s on their dime. They address it with a concept they call connected
autonomy, which they define as knowing when to stand alone and when to
accept help.
Patients come to Yellowbrick with a variety of problems: substance abuse,
eating disorders, depression, anxiety or one of the more severe mental
illnesses, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, that tend to appear in the
late teens or early 20s. The demands of imminent independence can worsen
mental-health problems or can create new ones for people who have managed
up to that point to perform all the expected roles — son or daughter,
boyfriend or girlfriend, student, teammate, friend — but get lost when
schooling ends and expected roles disappear. That’s what happened to one
patient who had done well at a top Ivy League college until the last class of
the last semester of his last year, when he finished his final paper and could
not bring himself to turn it in.
The Yellowbrick philosophy is that young people must meet these challenges
without coddling or rescue. Up to 16 patients at a time are housed in the
Yellowbrick residence, a four-story apartment building Viner owns. They live
in the apartments — which are large, sunny and lavishly furnished — in
groups of three or four, with staff members always on hand to teach the
basics of shopping, cooking, cleaning, scheduling, making commitments and
showing up.
Viner let me sit in on daily clinical rounds, scheduled that day for C., a young
woman who had been at Yellowbrick for three months. Rounds are like the
world’s most grueling job interview: the patient sits in front alongside her
clinician “advocate,” and a dozen or so staff members are arrayed on couches
and armchairs around the room, firing questions. C. seemed nervous but
pleased with herself, frequently flashing a huge white smile. She is 22, tall
and skinny, and she wore tiny denim shorts and a big T-shirt and vest. She
started to fall apart during her junior year at college, plagued by binge
drinking and anorexia, and in her first weeks at Yellowbrick her alcohol abuse
continued. Most psychiatric facilities would have kicked her out after the first
relapse, said Dale Monroe-Cook, Yellowbrick’s vice president of clinical
operations. “We’re doing the opposite: we want the behavior to unfold, and
we want to be there in that critical moment, to work with that behavior and
help the emerging adult transition to greater independence.”
The Yellowbrick staff let C. face her demons and decide how to deal with
them. After five relapses, C. asked the staff to take away her ID so she
couldn’t buy alcohol. Eventually she decided to start going to meetings of
Alcoholics Anonymous.
At her rounds in June, C. was able to report that she had been alcohol-free for
30 days. Jesse Viner’s wife, Laura Viner, who is a psychologist on staff,
started to clap for her, but no one else joined in. “We’re on eggshells here,”
Gary Zurawski, a clinical social worker specializing in substance abuse,
confessed to C. “We don’t know if we should congratulate you too much.” The
staff was sensitive about taking away the young woman’s motivation to
improve her life for her own sake, not for the sake of getting praise from
someone else.
C. took the discussion about the applause in stride and told the staff she had
more good news: in two days she was going to graduate. On time.
THE 20S ARE LIKE the stem cell of human development, the pluripotent
moment when any of several outcomes is possible. Decisions and actions
during this time have lasting ramifications. The 20s are when most people
accumulate almost all of their formal education; when most people meet their
future spouses and the friends they will keep; when most people start on the
careers that they will stay with for many years. This is when adventures,
experiments, travels, relationships are embarked on with an abandon that
probably will not happen again.
Does that mean it’s a good thing to let 20-somethings meander — or even to
encourage them to meander — before they settle down? That’s the question
that plagues so many of their parents. It’s easy to see the advantages to the
delay. There is time enough for adulthood and its attendant obligations;
maybe if kids take longer to choose their mates and their careers, they’ll make
fewer mistakes and live happier lives. But it’s just as easy to see the
drawbacks. As the settling-down sputters along for the “emerging adults,”
things can get precarious for the rest of us. Parents are helping pay bills they
never counted on paying, and social institutions are missing out on young
people contributing to productivity and growth. Of course, the recession
complicates things, and even if every 20-something were ready to skip the
“emerging” moratorium and act like a grown-up, there wouldn’t necessarily
be jobs for them all. So we’re caught in a weird moment, unsure whether to
allow young people to keep exploring and questioning or to cut them off and
tell them just to find something, anything, to put food on the table and get on
with their lives.
Arnett would like to see us choose a middle course. “To be a young American
today is to experience both excitement and uncertainty, wide-open possibility
and confusion, new freedoms and new fears,” he writes in “Emerging
Adulthood.” During the timeout they are granted from nonstop, often tedious
and dispiriting responsibilities, “emerging adults develop skills for daily
living, gain a better understanding of who they are and what they want from
life and begin to build a foundation for their adult lives.” If it really works that
way, if this longer road to adulthood really leads to more insight and better
choices, then Arnett’s vision of an insightful, sensitive, thoughtful, content,
well-honed, self-actualizing crop of grown-ups would indeed be something
worth waiting for.
Robin Marantz Henig is a contributing writer. Her last article for the magazine was about
anxiety.
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