Jim Johnson's List: Sociality

• While critics of immigration are the first to speak for the very class of people they tend to dismiss -- "they don't want to be American" or "they are weakening our common identity" -- Ms. Schildkraut's new book, "Americanism in the Twenty-First Century: Public Opinion in the Age of Immigration," finds something much more benign, even graceful, in the American narrative.

  In a 144-question telephone survey of 2,800 people nationwide, cutting across every imaginable demographic, it turns out that a rather obvious fact for most Americans is actually validated by the numbers: Immigrants and those born in the country share similar values of what it means to be an American. Regarding those great American notions of embracing economic and political freedoms, there is barely a distinction. Better still, as Ms. Schildkraut told me, "This is not just about rights, but also about obligations and being engaged through this notion of civic republicanism." Immigrants and those born here believe in giving as much as they do in taking.

• But perhaps the most important contribution of Ms. Schildkraut's analysis is that immigrants and American natives all agree that maintaining the cultural traditions of our ancestors is essential. As first generation immigrants who are most likely to maintain strong cultural ties begin to assimilate, their children and grandchildren tend to regret not having stronger ties to their mother country.

  It is truly American to be nostalgic for the non-American in most of us.

• But this is not another rant against email. Email is magic. It enables abundant, free communication.
• Today, I video chat through my Gmail account with friends in Budapest or Tokyo -- for free. Seriously, magic.
• Many have attempted to lend social context to communication, helping us naturally to filter out what is less important. But our culture has not yet abandoned emails en masse for social networks in the way that we abandoned landlines, for example, in favor of cell phones. Unless a communications tool is adopted by everyone, becoming the cultural norm, it is useless because users can't trust their messages will be received.
• Could it be that our end goal is wrong? Most of these services are focused on helping us digest more -- more information on more topics coming from more people.
• Two decades ago British anthropologist Robin Dunbar studied the social connections in groups of monkeys and mapped this information to brain size to come up with a theory that the maximum number of relationships a human being can realistically manage is 150. Talk to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and they'll often demonstrate how their services can help you game "the Dunbar number," as it is called, nursing far more than 150 relationships. Is this the right objective? Or should we instead be focusing on how to limit communication, to nurture and deepen a smaller number of relationships?
• We all know people who are Facebook refusers
• but most of us would never bow out entirely. We're too afraid we'd miss something important. Instead, we arrange to take our digital sabbaticals in hopes that for someone, somewhere, a big idea—the solution to the 21st century's biggest information problem--will emerge.

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• The link between childhood trauma and adult outcomes was striking.
• In Paul Tough's essential book, "How Children Succeed," he describes what's going on. Childhood stress can have long-lasting neural effects, making it harder to exercise self-control, focus attention, delay gratification and do many of the other things that contribute to a happy life.
• In the past several decades, policy makers have focused on the material and bureaucratic things that correlate to school failure
• But, more recently, attention has shifted to the psychological reactions that impede learning -- the ones that flow from insecure relationships, constant movement and economic anxiety.
• Attention has shifted toward the psychological for several reasons. First, it's become increasingly clear that social and emotional deficits can trump material or even intellectual progress.
• Second, over the past few years, an array of psychological researchers have taught us that motivation, self-control and resilience are together as important as raw IQ and are probably more malleable.
• Finally, pop culture has been far out front of policy makers in showing how social dysfunction can ruin lives.

• Schools are now casting about, trying to find psychological programs that will help students work on resilience, equanimity and self-control. Some schools give two sets of grades -- one for academic work and one for deportment.

  And it's not just schools that are veering deeper into the psychological realms. Health care systems are going the same way, tracing obesity and self-destructive habits back to social breakdown and stress.
• But, in their disjointed ways, they are all dealing with the same problem
• Maybe it's time for people in all these different fields to get together in a room and make a concerted push against the psychological barriers to success.

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• One of the mysteries of life is that millions of Americans are enjoying the benefits of government -- but are either unaware of it or in denial.

  A 2008 study found that 40 percent of Medicare recipients, 44 percent of Social Security beneficiaries, 53 percent of people with student loans and 60 percent of homeowners with taxpayer-subsidized mortgages answered "no" when asked whether they were using a government social program.

• About two years ago, the folks at Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs.
• I'd like to tell a story about the last half-century, based on studies done with this search engine
• So the story I'd like to tell is this: Over the past half-century, society has become more individualistic. As it has become more individualistic, it has also become less morally aware, because social and moral fabrics are inextricably linked.
• Conservatives sometimes argue that if we could just reduce government to the size it was back in, say, the 1950s, then America would be vibrant and free again. But the underlying sociology and moral culture is just not there anymore. Government could be smaller when the social fabric was more tightly knit, but small government will have different and more cataclysmic effects today when it is not.
• Liberals sometimes argue that our main problems come from the top: a self-dealing elite, the oligarchic bankers. But the evidence suggests that individualism and demoralization are pervasive up and down society, and may be even more pervasive at the bottom. Liberals also sometimes talk as if our problems are fundamentally economic and can be addressed politically, through redistribution. But maybe the root of the problem is also cultural. The social and moral trends swamp the proposed redistributive remedies.
• Evidence from crude data sets like these are prone to confirmation bias. People see patterns they already believe in.

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• Dawkins promoted this gist: “a society based simply on the gene’s law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very very nasty society… Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature…because we are born selfish”.
• Dawkins falls for a “fallacy of composition.” He inappropriately extends properties of parts to wholes. An absurd example is: each atom in a teacup is invisible, therefore the teacup is invisible. Dawkins projects his preferred “selfish” zero-sum property of genes onto everything built by genes, and falsely concludes everything that has “evolved…should be selfish.” But all genes are also cooperative. And besides, no gene-level property can be safely projected onto all things that have genes, or everything they do. Biology isn’t that simple. It mixes competition and cooperation.
• In later editions Dawkins partially recants his central selfish dogma, saying “without departing from fundamental laws of the selfish gene theory… cooperation and mutual assistance can flourish.” Game Theory had proved his prophecy of “little help from biological nature” to be false. Cooperating generously can be an evolutionarily stable strategy, with higher productivity than selfishness.
• In the 30th anniversary edition, he conceded that “born selfish is misleading” and asked readers to “Please mentally delete that rogue sentence and others like it.”

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• Understanding how "familiar strangers" interact could help scientists stem the spread of disease and learn how a sense of community evolves in a neighborhood
• cientists have long suspected our passive interactions with these sorts of “familiar strangers” may be more important than we realize, such encounters have gone largely unstudied.
• an analysis of the structure of social networks among strangers using public transportation, from research
• at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, is filling that void.

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• Those who were both victim and perpetrator as schoolchildren fared the worst as adults: They were more than six times more likely to be diagnosed with a serious illness or psychiatric disorder, and to smoke regularly
• Victim-perpetrators are "the most socially defeated because they actually do try to fight back but they're unsuccessful,
• Previous work by the Duke-Warwick team showed bullies and bully-victims tended to come from families with harsh parenting, while victims tended to have overprotective "helicopter parents."
• the authors and previous studies suggest that victims resort to bullying behavior when they are from deprived families, have poor emotional regulation or have mental health problems, among them poor coping strategies for stress.

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• Across many studies of mammals, from the smallest rodents all the way to us humans, the data suggests that we are profoundly shaped by our social environment and that we suffer greatly when our social bonds are threatened or severed. 
• We tend to assume that people’s behavior is narrowly self-interested, focused on getting more material benefits for themselves and avoiding physical threats and the exertion of effort.  But because of how social pain and pleasure are wired into our operating system, these are motivational ends in and of themselves. 

• the group has developed a set of online tools to engage kids with information about healthy relationships, waiting to have sex until they’re ready, and using birth control. In a press release about the new initiative, Planned Parenthood described it as the “future” of sex education.
• The organization developed age-appropriate tools for three different groups. The apps targeted at the youngest group encourage elementary-age kids to start initiating conversations with their parents about relationships and sexuality.
• The tools for middle school kids focus on helping them clarify their goals about their futures, including whether and when they want to have children. They’re designed to get them to consider the risks of becoming sexually active and make a commitment to delay sex until they’re older.
• Once kids get to high school and approach the age when they may be about to have sex for the first time — the national average for becoming sexually active is 17 years old — the resources for them shift focus a little bit. Then, the apps help make sure they have all the facts about practicing safe sex. There’s a lot of emphasis on partnership: information about how guys can support their female partner’s birth control use, as well as how girls can support their male partner’s condom use.
• Planned Parenthood employees did extensive testing while they were developing the tools, making sure to get teens’ feedback along the way, and they actually saw a lot of interest.
• the apps, which were built in line with the current standards for effective comprehensive sex ed programs, aren’t intended to replace sex ed courses in school or conversations at home with parents. But they could help fill in some gaps — particularly in areas that don’t mandate sexual health curricula for students
• Although it often gets lost in the politicized discussion about Planned Parenthood, which the right-wing decries as the nation’s largest abortion provider, the organization is also the largest provider of sex education in the country.

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• the biggest shake-up has been in education. In 1962, men made up about 65 percent of college enrollees; today they make up about 43 percent.
• other side of that figure is the dropout rate for men
• it's twice as high as the female dropout rate.
• A growing number of well-educated, professional women ... are unable to find men of similar education.
• Survey after survey shows that 60 to 70 percent of men still agree with the notion that masculinity depends on emotional stoicism — never showing fear, never showing pain,
• So, the world has changed dramatically, and yet most men still cling tenaciously to an ideology of masculinity that comes off the set of Mad Men.
• But Kimmel says today's boys and young men have a much better sense of gender equality than many of their fathers did. He sees a clear example in cross-sex friendship
• When he first started asking, about 10 percent would answer yes. Today, almost everyone does.

• Noguera also has seen men become much more involved with raising their children and general housework.

  "But what hasn't come with that is a new definition of what it means to be a man as a nurturer in the family,"
• He says today's men are searching for a way to reconcile old ideas related to strength with the need to be better listeners, more cooperative and more open to others.

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• people who sign up to the social networking site must agree to its terms and conditions before gaining access; in doing so, users accept that their information may be used for “… data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”

• the Motion Picture Association of America, which is the trade organization of the film industry, claims that the reason that's happening is because parents are becoming more accepting.
• the MPAA relies on parents' recommendations for its ratings.
• Romer thinks it might be time for movies to be rated by an independent panel that could push back against was called ratings creep. The clips he showed parents from the original "Terminator" and "Die Hard" were rated R. Clips he showed form more recent "Die Hard" and "Terminator" movies were just as violent, but rated PG-13.

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