Teenagers find a lot of things boring, not least school. So I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that the young people I met as part of my research in South African schools found their history classes boring. But I was surprised. And this was because I met them while they were learning about the history of apartheid—a history through which their parents and grandparents lived; a history that still shapes much of the world in which they live.

To be sure, much has changed since the early 1990s, when a negotiated settlement ended white minority rule on the southern tip of Africa. Yet even as a democracy, South Africa is one of the most unequal in the world—and that inequality remains highly racialized. For example, less than 1 percent of South African households headed by whites live below the poverty line. In contrast, almost half of all households headed by black Africans (46.6 percent) live in poverty. On the other end of the distribution, while over 60 percent of whites are considered “skilled workers” (managers or professionals), this is true for less than 20 percent of black Africans.

Understanding present-day South Africa requires understanding how apartheid fundamentally shaped race and inequality. How do young South Africans, born into democracy, learn about their country’s history of racial discrimination and segregation? Does it help them make sense of contemporary social issues?

These questions animated my research in two South African high schools. When I began my research, I expected the teaching of apartheid to engender emotions like guilt, anger, and shame. Instead, I found boredom. The boredom was especially striking when contrasted with students’ interest in the Holocaust, which they studied the same year.

Why did students experience learning the history of two large-scale, traumatic twenty-first century events so differently?

When I began my research, I expected the teaching of apartheid to engender emotions like guilt, anger, and shame. Instead, I found boredom.

I should say that I never planned to compare the teaching of apartheid to that of the Holocaust, nor did I intend to study boredom. These topics emerged meaningfully during my 18 months of field work embedded in grade 9 history classes. Informed by a theory-building (as opposed to theory-testing) approach to qualitative research, I dug deeper into these unexpected findings, trying to understand why students received the two histories so differently.

I found that, far from being a natural state of high school, student boredom was driven by key differences in how the two histories were taught. Whereas the Holocaust was taught as a causal story that animated student interest, apartheid was taught primarily through lists (of laws and events). My data also revealed what boredom does socially, by pointing to the relationship between boredom, avoidance, and silencing. Under a boring rendering of history, the past is not engaged. It is presented as distant and irrelevant, and its ongoing legacies (that can cause uncomfortable feelings and difficult dynamics in multiracial contexts) can be ignored. These findings raise questions about how boredom operates in other instances where difficult emotions might be present, like diversity and inclusion trainings.

The dataset I drew on to unpack student boredom came from two formerly “whites only”—now desegregated—South African high schools. The schools I selected for this study are known as “former Model-C” schools and are among the country’s most racially and socioeconomically diverse. I chose them because I was interested in how histories of racial oppression are discussed in contexts of diversity. I focused on grade 9 as this is the year when young people (aged 14–15), across the country, learn about apartheid in a mandatory history module. I spent approximately 400 hours observing in history classrooms. I collected all written materials used in classes and interviewed the ten grade 9 history teachers as well as 160 students of different racial backgrounds. I spoke with half of these students before they took the apartheid module and the other half after they had completed it.

Far from being a natural state of high school, student boredom was driven by key differences in how the two histories were taught.

I became acutely aware of students’ comparative interest in the Holocaust over apartheid when negotiating access to the second school in my study, Roxbridge (names of schools and participants changed to protect confidentiality). The official curriculum states that the Holocaust should be taught in the first part of the year, followed by apartheid in the second half. However, Roxbridge deviated from the official curriculum by teaching apartheid first. In South Africa, near the end of grade 9 is when students choose their matriculation subjects, which they take until they graduate high school. At Roxbridge, teachers wanted to make sure that the Holocaust was being covered during the crucial “subject choice” period, as students enjoyed learning this section. Apartheid, which was perceived as not very interesting, was taught first to get it out of the way—even though this did not make chronological sense.

This change echoed sentiments I heard the previous year from teachers and students at Glenville—the other school in my study. They also told me that the Holocaust was far more interesting than apartheid. At both schools, the Holocaust section focused on a charismatic leader and psychological processes of brainwashing through propaganda. Students were especially fascinated by Hitler and wanted to know what motivated him and his supporters.

Nomvula, a black African student, told me that she enjoyed the Holocaust section. “You just look at [Hitler] and say, ‘What was he thinking doing all these things?’ And you’re just trying to figure out why he did them,” she said. To be sure, there are many, many problems with this historical narrative. However, in terms of understanding boredom, it highlights how causal questions—What made Hitler this way? What pushed people to support him? What were the consequences?—propel the narrative and generate student interest.

In contrast, teachers taught about apartheid as a series of lists. In an interview with me, one teacher at Roxbridge identified this as a key driver in student boredom. She explained: “They literally get a list of acts that were passed and then a list of how it affected the country, and then a list of how it went about to get changed.” In both schools, students had to learn by heart not only what apartheid’s various laws said but also their precise names and the exact dates of their implementations. The result, she explained, was that they approached the section with an attitude of, “We know about that. We know about the segregation. We know about the Mixed Marriages Act. We know about the Group Areas Act.” Instead of asking “why” questions, as they did with the Holocaust, students felt bored by apartheid and its lists.

Under a boring rendering of history, the past is not engaged. It is presented as distant and irrelevant, and its ongoing legacies can be ignored.

I don’t have any data to suggest that teachers intended to make the apartheid section boring. However, as I show in other work, they certainly tried to avoid expressions of guilt and anger in their schools and classrooms. To do so, they taught about apartheid in ways that distanced it from young people’s everyday experiences. Avoiding causal questions achieved this aim, but it also constructed the history as boring. At the same time, the collective framing of apartheid as “boring” likely silenced students who wanted to engage the past as part of their lived realities.

When I interviewed students after they had taken the apartheid module, I asked them whether there was ever a time in class when they wanted to say something but held back because they were worried about others’ reactions. Zodwa, a black African student, told me there have been times when she wondered, “Why did they do that?” She added, “I don’t know why they did it. Why did they hurt people like that? Why did they destroy so many families?”

She didn’t ask these questions, she said, because some students in her class would like to “just leave it in the past … just move forward and just forget about it.” I probed, asking whether the other students said those things in class. Zodwa answered: “Well they don’t really say it, but I can just see it in their attitude, like they feel bored … I can sense that.”

Boredom, in other words, is not a neutral emotion. It is an emotion related to silencing and avoidance, regulating what can be discussed and defending against more difficult emotions like guilt and anger. North American race scholars have identified a variety of beliefs that deny the effects of the past, enabling racism to continue unchecked in the era of civil liberties. Within the first decade of democracy, similar ideas began circulating in South Africa. My research shows how, as a racialized emotion, boredom supports such historical distancing, allowing the past—and its legacies—to be dismissed.  

Getting the past into the curriculum is only the first step. What matters next is how the facts of history are connected into a narrative, and what emotions these connections engender.

South Africa is not the only place where schools confront the nation’s violent, racist, and shameful past. Research in a variety of countries, such as Germany, the United States, Australia, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and Rwanda (to name but a few), has pointed to some of the challenges involved in educating young people about history. My research suggests further attention to boredom’s role in these processes.

Teenagers get bored about a lot, but boredom is not a given. When it comes to engaging with difficult topics, it’s worth asking: Whose interests does boredom serve? What does it help people avoid? And what might it mean to tell more “interesting” stories? At a time when countries across the globe grapple with how to deal with their own racist histories, South Africa offers an instructive case. Getting the past into the curriculum is only the first step. What matters next is how the facts of history are connected into a narrative, and what emotions these connections engender.

The post What Does Boredom Teach Us About How We Engage with History? appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

By the time I graduated college, the conventional wisdom among those who loved to reject conventional wisdom was not only that being creative was a good thing but that creative people were going to inherit the earth.

A recent crop of cocktail-party nonfiction about Right-Brainers and Bourgeoise Bohemians and something called the Creative Class said the age of rule-loving “organization men” had passed, leaving the field to those who rebelled against the status quo. As factories left American shores and computers automated more and more white-collar brainwork, the raw material of our increasingly “weightless” postindustrial economy was no longer steel and coal, but rather ideas.

In this “weightless” and “increasingly complex world,” the creatives, long confided to garrets and bohemian cafes, would finally take their places as the leaders of a bright new future. The MFA was the new MBA.

These turn-of-the-millennium prophesies soon became dogma. In 2010, a poll of 1,500 CEOs ranked creativity as “the most important leadership quality for success in business,” beating out such virtues as integrity and global thinking. The Partnership for the 21st Century Skills, a committee representing the National Educational Association, the Department of Education, and a handful of top tech companies including Apple, Microsoft, and Cisco, listed creativity as one of the “4 Cs” along with communication, collaboration, and critical thinking.

And in 2020 the World Economic Forum declared creativity “the one skill that will future-proof you for the jobs market.” We apparently already knew that: back in 2011, “creative” was already the most common adjective job applicants used to describe themselves on LinkedIn.

Creativity’s Big Bang

We tend to assume creativity is a timeless human value. But in fact, creativity has only been a regular part of our vocabulary since the middle of the twentieth century. Its first known written occurrence was in 1875, making it an infant as far as words go.

“Creativeness” goes back a bit further, and was more common than creativity until about 1940, but both were used rarely and ad hoc. Strikingly, before about 1950 there were approximately zero articles, books, essays, treatises, odes, classes, encyclopedia entries, or anything of the sort dealing explicitly with the subject of “creativity.” (The earliest dictionary entry I found was from 1966.)

It is not, it turns out, in Plato or Aristotle (even in translation). It’s not in Kant (ditto). It’s not in Wordsworth or Shelley, or in the Americans Emerson, William James, or John Dewey. As the intellectual historian Paul Oskar Kristeller finds, creativity, though we tend to assume it is a timeless concept, is a term with “poor philosophical and historical credentials.”

Yet, just around the end of World War II, the use of “creativity” shot upward—the big bang of creativity.

How did we so quickly go from never talking about creativity to constantly talking about, it, and even anointing it as the reigning value of our time? What was it about the dawn of the postwar era that demanded this new Swiss Army knife of a term? And whom did it serve?

When I began researching creativity’s big bang, I imagined finding its roots in the burgeoning youthful counterculture—the spirit of self-expression, experimentation, and rebelliousness that would crest in the 1960s and give that decade its distinctive mark. Instead, I found that the creativity craze began somewhat earlier, in the 1950s, an era we associate with conformity, bureaucracy, and suburbanization.

And it didn’t come from artists or the bohemian fringe in that era, either. As Dorothy Parker quipped in 1958, the high-water mark of the postwar creativity craze, the more a writer actually sits down to write, “the less he will get into small clusters bandying about the word ‘creativity.’”

How did we so quickly go from never talking about creativity to constantly talking about, it, and even anointing it as the reigning value of our time?

Despite the fact that many in the postwar American art world embraced self-expression and experimentation, it turns out the efforts to really get under the hood of something called creativity—which also encompassed ideas like “creative ability,” “the creative personality,” and “the creative process”—were primarily driven by a concern not for art per se but for inventiveness in science, technology, consumer products, and advertising.

At the same time, the artsy connotations were not incidental: the postwar cult of creativity was driven by a desire to impart on science, technology, and consumer culture some of the qualities widely seen to be possessed by artists, such as nonconformity, passion for work, and a humane, even moral sensibility, in addition to, of course, a penchant for the new.

As America emerged from World War II, the needs of industry were changing. Having achieved a productive capacity far beyond that necessary to meet everyone’s basic needs, management was suddenly less worried about efficiency than about marketing, innovation, and adaptability. As Peter Drucker said, not manufacturing but “innovation and marketing” were the new managerial priorities.

Particularly as computers began to assume some of the more menial office tasks, managers began to fret that a whole half century of inculcating in workers the values of rationality and order, and encouraging specialization, was leaving the workforce ill equipped for this new reality. Just as the wartime factories had to be retooled to meet the demands of a consumer economy, so did the white-collar worker need to be retooled.

Creativity as a Cure

The concept of creativity, typically defined as a kind of trait or process vaguely associated with artists and geniuses but theoretically possessed by anyone and applicable to any field, emerged as a psychological cure for these structural and political contradictions of the postwar order. Psychologists developed tests to identify “creative people” based largely on the needs of military and corporate R & D, but they were also motivated by a larger desire to save individuals from the psychic oppression of modernity.

Likewise, in industry, the first creative thinking methods, such as brainstorming, were initially geared toward industrial improvement and new product development, but they did so by addressing alienation on the job. Advertising professionals touted “creative advertising” as both a cure for lagging sales and a way to bring individual vision back into their field. And many corporations embraced creativity not only to help spur innovation but also because it made them look more humane amid backlash against the military-industrial complex.

In all of these cases, the practical matters of staffing R & D labs, coming up with new product ideas, or selling said products coexisted with larger concerns about conformity, alienation, and the morality of work.

Bruner suspected that what really lay behind the sudden interest in research on creativity was an anxiety about the nature of white-collar work.

Creativity could, for one thing, ease a nagging tension between the utilitarian and the humane or transcendent. In 1962, the distinguished psychologist Jerome Bruner noted “a shrillness to our contemporary concern with creativity.” Psychologists were being asked to dissect the nature of “the creative” not purely as scientists “but as adjutants to the moralist.”

Bruner suspected that what really lay behind the sudden interest in research on creativity was an anxiety about the nature of white-collar work, particularly among scientists and technicians. These workers had been inculcated with the dogma of professionalism and efficiency, seeing themselves as part of a great social machine.

For an engineer or an advertising professional, to be creative was not simply to be productive, though it was that, but also to model oneself not on the machine but on the artist or poet. It was to pursue work with an intrinsic motivation, a passion for the act of creation. It was to be more human. Though this didn’t necessarily change anything about the actual products these workers were employed to invent, design, and sell, it did implicitly add a moral aura to their work by shifting the emphasis from product to the process itself, creativity.

Hope and Tension

The development of the concept of creativity by psychologists and creative thinking experts allowed for the emergence of a new form of subjectivity, the creative person. The creative person was a producer in a world of consumers. No impotent Babbitt or parasitic pencil-pusher, the creative person was a rebel and freethinker. They lived to create. This person, generally assumed to be male, was nonetheless construed as more emotionally sensitive than the old model. As reductive as they were, these tweaks to the middle-class self did broaden the view of whose mental labor might be valuable.

It should be no surprise that in the liberation movements of the 1960s, arguments for the right to participate in national life were sometimes made in the language of creativity. For instance, when Betty Friedan wrote in 1963 that women could achieve self-realization only through “creative work,” she meant work that was traditionally male, such as journalism, the sort recognized as worthy of remuneration and renown.

For an engineer or an advertising professional, to be creative was not simply to be productive, though it was that, but also to model oneself not on the machine but on the artist or poet.

Friedan embodies an additional key theme—a tension between optimism and pessimism. She was deeply critical of the way the world was, but also hopeful for what it could be. Focusing on creativity, which spoke of excellence, excitement, even joy, was for many an act of hope.

Many psychologists, for example, contrasted their creativity research with the focus on mental illness and dysfunction that had preoccupied their field, while creativity management consultants imagined they were leading the charge in forming a more humane workplace. These people hoped that automation and affluence would provide more opportunities for human flourishing, even a transcendence of traditional capitalist relations. Could we be headed, as Thomas Watson of IBM put it, for “a new age of Pericles,” our material needs met and our minds free to partake in higher artistic and intellectual pursuits? Or would it all lead to opulence and stagnation, dooming America, as the historian Arnold Toynbee had warned, to the fate of fallen civilizations past?

For all the optimism that gathered around creativity, the very need to name, and so to begin to understand and master, this thing, some individual font of dynamism, betrayed a deep fear that it was already sorely lacking.

Finally, besides the overarching tension between the individual and mass society, and between optimism and pessimism, creativity also mediated between elitist and egalitarian tendencies. On one hand, the postwar era was a profoundly democratic age, characterized by a strong welfare state, expanding minority rights, and widely shared prosperity. Americans were constantly reminded that it was in the name of democracy that they fought wars and now aggressively patrolled the globe, and the figure of the “common man” still had some heroic charm from the Depression years.

On the other hand, particularly after the Russian launch of Sputnik, the fear of “mediocrity” brought on a new, often reactionary focus on “excellence.” Toynbee lamented that America was neglecting its “creative minority” and so risking the kind of decline that befell every great empire before it. The question was, as the title of the 1961 John W. Gardner book put it, “can we be equal and excellent too?” It’s no coincidence that Gardner, as an officer of the Carnegie Corporation, funded some of the earliest and most influential psychological research on creativity.

To understand how recently creativity arrived, and the messy, practical world from which it arose, is to understand how we got to our own situation.

Creativity was a topic capacious enough to apply to Great Men as well as elementary school children and rank-and-file engineers. Unlike genius, creativity could be said to exist in everyone, and in that sense was both more democratic and (more importantly, perhaps) more useful for managers overseeing scores or hundreds or thousands of employees. It satisfied a nostalgia for an earlier age of the genius inventor and entrepreneur, but in a form befitting the ideological and pragmatic realities of the mass society.

Creativity Today

Excavating this history overturns many assumptions we have about creativity, including that it’s always been with us, or that it was once a term reserved for gods, artists, and geniuses. To understand how recently creativity arrived, and the messy, practical world from which it arose, is to understand how we got to our own situation.

Today’s dogged determination to “do what you love” and our disdain for the nine-to-five; the very fact that we now have a class of people known simply as “creatives” or even “creators”; and the persistence of optimism despite so many cruel realities of modern capitalism—all of these can in some way trace their origins to the immediate postwar cult of creativity.

The fact that we are still in many ways dealing with the same contradictions helps explain why we continue to be so enamored of the idea, and why so many of us want so desperately to be creative.

Reprinted with permission from The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History by Samuel W. Franklin, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2023 by Samuel W. Franklin. All rights reserved.

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The post The Surprising Origins of Our Obsession with Creativity appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

In their book, Streets of Gold, economic historians Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan examine the myths and truths surrounding immigration in the United States. They are like curious grandchildren, they write, hoping to trace the journey of their ancestors, piece together their stories, and find out what their lives were really like. Unlike most curious grandchildren though, Abramitzky and Boustan’s research consists of millions of families, not just their own.

What their research reveals is that stories about immigrants in the past and rhetoric about immigrants today needs a major revision. In Streets of Gold, they help rectify three fictions about immigration. “First, the nostalgic view of immigrants in the past moving quickly from rags to riches does not fit the facts,” they write. “Second, newcomers today are just as quick to move up the economic ladder as in the past, and immigrants now are integrating into American culture just as surely as immigrants did back then. And finally, immigrant success does not come at the expense of U.S.-born workers.”

I recently spoke with Abramitzky about how he and Boustan traced immigrant lives over the past century and a half and what they learned as they followed families over multiple generations. We then turned to questions around what it means for an immigrant to assimilate in America and why it makes sense to view immigration through the lens of generations in the U.S. rather than years in the U.S. Finally, we discuss what their analysis of 200,000 political speeches, dating from 1870 to the present, revealed about how attitudes toward immigrants changed (or didn’t) over time. (Preview: the tenor of speeches was negative for much of U.S. history, then flipped in the generation after WWII and has remained generally positive since.)

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Evan Nesterak: Immigration is a topic that’s heavily researched, it’s a topic that’s frequently in the news. What made you and Leah decide that the history of immigration in the U.S. needed more data, in particular a big data approach?

Ran Abramitzky: Leah and I are economic historians. We had this idea that a lot of what people think they know about immigration today—about how immigrants are behaving or misbehaving today—takes them back to think about how immigrants were in the past; this nostalgic view that in the past things were much better.

Even if you listen to people like Rush Limbaugh or Barack Obama, they would agree that Italian immigrants in the past were terrific. They came here and they made their way in the U.S. and they completely Americanized. But Limbaugh and Obama have very different opinions about immigrants today.

As economic historians, we knew that in the past too there were a lot of anti-immigrant sentiments, and things weren’t as rosy as they may sound. So we wanted to collect data on many, many immigrants and see whether some of these stories and myths that we have about immigration are true or are really myths.

Can you describe what you did to get a more accurate understanding of U.S. immigration past and present?

Think of us like the curious grandchildren who search for their ancestors in the historical records, in particular census records, and multiply these efforts by millions. The idea is that after 72 years in the United States all the records in government documents become publicly available. Seventy-two years because the idea is that enough time has to pass in order for you to stop worrying about confidentiality and privacy concerns.

After 72 years—meaning until the 1940 census and soon 1950—you will find the names of people, you will see who they marry, where they live, how they name their children, what they did for a job, their earnings (if you look at the 1940 census), you will see which neighborhoods they were in, you will see a lot of identifying information about them. And once you have that, you now have a cross-section of the life stories of many, many immigrants.

But one of the things we do is we want to see how things progress over time. For example, I found my relatives in the 1900s. They came to the U.S., they were a spotter and a junk driver, but I want to see how they and their families progress over time. If I find them in the 1910 census, I can look them up again in the 1920 census, and then in the 1930 census, and then I can look at their kids in the 1940 census when they are grown-ups. We don’t have Social Security numbers, so we can’t perfectly link everybody, but because we have their first name and last name, year of birth, place of birth, we can link people and their children over time, and that way we create genealogies of many, many thousands or millions of people.

We can start to ask questions like: Is it really true that immigrants came with nothing and then quickly moved from rags to riches? Is it really true that immigrants don’t attempt to assimilate? Is it necessarily the case that their success comes at the expense of the U.S. born?

Then we can start to ask questions like, Is it really true that immigrants came with nothing and then quickly moved from rags to riches? Is it really true that immigrants don’t attempt to assimilate? Are they actually moving away from immigrant neighborhoods and do they marry outside of their groups? Is it necessarily the case that their success comes at the expense of the U.S. born?

We also wanted to get a richer story. The census is kind of cut and dry. We wanted to get a sense of the richer experience of immigrants, and this is where we went to Ellis Island. The Ellis Island Foundation conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of immigrants where you can see what their experience was like, why they came, what it was like in the United States. We make use of those records as well. We also looked at Congressional speeches over the last 150 years to see how attitudes toward immigrants have changed.

In the present, the data is a little bit easier to access. At the same time, there are confidentiality issues, so we don’t have access to the same level of granularity to exactly see how you name your children and everything like that, so we make use of the data available—for example, through Opportunity Insights, which is data from IRS and Census Records on all Americans. Wherever possible, we try to collect data in the present so that we can make a past-present comparison—if it's in the speeches in Congress, if it is in the mobility of children, if it is in how immigrants themselves are doing.

In the book, you tell immigration stories that are more representative of the immigrant experience based on the data. How does the nostalgic immigration story that many might have in mind, the mythical rise from rags to riches, compare to a story that’s more representative?

We have a complicated relationship with stories in the book. On the one hand, it is the stories that immigrants tell themselves, the family lore, that make some of these myths persist for a long time—“My father came here with $20, very quickly opened a business, and became rich.” Things like this. Somehow the stories, overtime, become even more heroic. Almost everybody you talk to will come up with a story of somebody who moved up very quickly. And that is, I think, where the nostalgic view that we have about America, as someplace you can come to and move quickly from rags to riches, comes from.

When 30 million immigrants arrive in the United States, you will be able to find a story like this, many stories like this. You will also be able to find many stories that are very different than this. This is in part why immigration is such a contentious issue, because when there are 30 million immigrants, there will be an Einstein and there will be a mass murderer.

We were interested in following the phonebook, rather than the outlier stories. We wanted to see, What is the typical immigrant experience? When we do that, we find a more gradual story.

We were interested in following the phonebook, rather than the outlier stories. We wanted to see, What is the typical immigrant experience? When we do that, we find a more gradual story.

If you focus on my family or on Leah’s family, our stories are the more typical immigration stories. It’s the story of immigrants who arrived to the U.S. Even if they didn’t earn very much when they arrived, they improved their prospects a lot relative to how things were for them in Europe. But when they came here, they often would work in manual jobs. They did, over their lifetime, maybe move up the occupational ladder a little bit, but they very often remained in manual types of jobs, and they never moved to riches.

It is their children who really make this move from rags to riches. In my family’s case, the children of the immigrants became a lawyer and a doctor, for example. Leah’s family story is similar. One of the things we find is that the experience today is very similar to the experience in the past, which is no rags to riches in the first generation, but the second generation, the children of immigrants, are doing remarkably well.

You’re in a unique position as an economic historian studying U.S. immigration and a person who immigrated to the U.S. I’m curious, how do your experiences from your own personal immigration journey both intersect and diverge from what you are seeing in your research?

My interest in immigration is, in large part, because everybody in my family is an immigrant, both my family in Israel and my family in the United States. My grandparents moved to Israel and then subsequently lost all their family in the Holocaust, including parents and siblings. The other part of the family was a bit luckier. They moved to the United States in the 1920s, were at first in relatively manual labor, and then later their children did their very well. At least the American part—but, in fact, even the Israel part—is a typical story.

My story—I came to do my Ph.D. in economics at Northwestern University, and then I ended up staying; I became a professor at Stanford. That is also a quite a typical story, because immigrants today tend to come in one of two groups—either the low-skilled, the ones who end up picking crops, taking care of the elderly, working in construction, and so on. Or, they tend to be in academia, in the sciences, they’re more educated and working in business and academia, and so on. This is also a quite a representative story of the skilled part.

We’ve talked mostly about the unskilled part so far because there seems to be less debate in the U.S. about skilled immigrants and how much they contribute to the economy. In our book, we make the case that we shouldn’t be obsessed with only trying to get the very skilled and educated workers, because even for those who come with fewer skills, less education, and who end up working in manual jobs, they are doing work that is important to the U.S., because who else will take care of the elderly and pick the crops and do all these kinds of jobs that many Americans are not doing? But also, the children end up upwardly mobile, and more upwardly mobile than the children of the U.S. born even. Even people who come here with low skills eventually end up rising, and that was true both in the past and today.

How is studying immigration in the U.S. different from studying immigration in other countries? My perception is that the U.S. has a unique immigration story, different from Europe’s. And both are different from Israel’s. Can you put the U.S. immigration story in context with immigration elsewhere?

Your intuition is right. What we find is that this is not necessarily the immigration story everywhere. There is something special in America. For example, research in Europe, Canada, Australia, Germany, and England, doesn’t find the same upward mobility of immigrants that we find in the United States. There is some kind of special sauce in the United States that makes the experience of immigrants more successful. We haven’t quite figured out what the special sauce is.

It could be related to the fact that the U.S. has always been a nation of immigrants, and for 150 years has been a major receiving region of immigrants. Many people in the U.S. are immigrants or the children of immigrants, many people can trace their ancestors either to the Ellis Island era or to the current wave of immigration, and they are descendants themselves of immigrants.

There is some kind of special sauce in the United States that makes the experience of immigrants more successful. We haven’t quite figured out what the special sauce is.

Whereas in Europe, for much of the century, Europe was a sending region of immigrants. In the age of mass migration that we study in the book, many Europeans moved to the United States, 30 million of them. It’s only in recent decades that Europe is becoming more of a receiving region of immigrants. So perhaps they don’t have a long history of immigration.

One reason we couldn’t do a similar study in Europe is because we don’t have this long-term perspective that we have in the United States. There also seems to be more barriers, institutional barriers and otherwise, for immigrants in Europe. For all the issues that there are in the U.S., maybe it is a place that immigrants feel overall welcome and that they can come and be successful.

When immigrants come to the U.S., what are they assimilating to? Is it these broad behaviors like speaking English and marrying outside their communities? Or is there something definitively American that they’re assimilating to?

It’s actually a great question. It really is a deep question. As we write in the book, we don’t love the word assimilation. What exactly is it? What do you assimilate to? There are many different cultures in the United States. There is no one single thing into which to assimilate. We use it because that’s the word that the literature is using, also the word that politicians are using when they want to say that immigrants don’t integrate and become Americans. There is really no single answer for this.

We chose to analyze this in a more nonjudgmental way—speaking English, for example. We almost define it as how much immigrants are willing to reduce their cultural markers and adopt new ones. What exactly that is, it’s hard to define. This is why we look at it in various different ways. For example, we know what names Americans are giving to their children, so we can see whether the names that immigrants give their children become more like the ones that the U.S. born give. That would be an example of giving up some of the original marker of identity for the benefits of assimilation.

But you’re right, it's hard to know exactly how you define what they integrate to. And this is related to one of your previous questions, which is, at some level, unless you were brought here against your will, or you were Native American, then you’re an immigrant. The only question is when you arrived, and from where.

And so, at some level, what it is to become American is something that is constantly changing. What immigrants assimilated to in 1900 and what they assimilated to in 2000 will be very different. Mainly the points we wanted to make were, whatever it was at any point in time that was “U.S. born,” the immigrants adapted to it. They spoke English, but they also ended up not just marrying among themselves, not always staying in immigrant enclaves, and so on—and to remarkably similar degrees today and in the past, while at the same time enriching the U.S. culture and enriching the diversity in the U.S.

Something that I appreciated about the book was that you are bringing data to bear on an emotionally and politically charged topic. You describe the realities of the first generation and the upward mobility of the second generation. To me this point felt like a key to understanding the widely varying rhetoric that we hear from politicians and pundits about immigration. A lot of the rhetoric seems to depend on whether the reference point is the first generation or later generations. You and Leah write that when thinking about immigration policy in the U.S., it’s important to view it as a generation-by-generation policy. Could you unpack this idea?

We focus on the children of poor immigrants. Think about the children of immigrants growing up in families that are relatively poor, in the 25th percentile of the income distribution. Today, that would be something like both parents work minimum wage jobs. We look at the children of immigrants and the children of similarly poor U.S. born families. What we find is that the children of immigrants are more upwardly mobile than the children of the U.S. born, meaning they are more likely to move away from their parents’ poorer circumstances than the children of the U.S. born.

What’s remarkable is that this is true for immigrants from nearly every sending country. It is true both in the past and today, and to a similar degree. The children of immigrants from, say, Mexico and the Dominican Republic are just as upwardly mobile as the children of Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians 100 years ago.

The children of immigrants from, say, Mexico and the Dominican Republic are just as upwardly mobile as the children of Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians 100 years ago.

That was very interesting for us, because it shows that when there are all these concerns about immigrants,  critics often take a short-term view. Politicians often take a very short-term view. They say, Let’s look at who the immigrants are in this country, look, they are struggling, they are not doing as well as U.S. born. But that’s five years after they arrive, maybe 10 years even. And that was true always.

But when you take a longer-term view, and you look at the children of immigrants, or when you take the perspective of the immigrants that came here 100 years ago, and we know how things ended up for them, then you get a much more positive view of immigrants.

This is why we say that taking a short-term view of immigrants understates their success, and when you take a longer-term view, look at the children, then they are doing remarkably well. This is where we think that immigration policy that takes more of a generation view (that is, a view that takes generations in the U.S. rather than years in the U.S.) will have a more positive view on immigration. That’s one part of it.

The second part—the children of immigrants finding is quite interesting in another way. On the one hand, it cuts against the story that immigrants from some places will be successful and immigrants from other places will not be successful. On the other hand, it also cuts against the story that is saying, Of course immigrants and the children of immigrants are amazing, immigrants are so motivated, and they are so terrific, and they are great in any place.

But when we look at why it is the case that immigrants are more upwardly mobile than the children of the U.S. born, we find evidence for a more mundane explanation that has to do with location choice. For sure immigrants are motivated, they are resilient and all that; it’s not to take anything away from that. But what we find is that one of the reasons the children of immigrants are more upwardly mobile than the children of the U.S. born is that immigrants tend to move to places in the United States that offer upward mobility for everyone. In the past, this meant that immigrants avoided the U.S. South, which was a place of very low upward mobility for everyone. They moved to places that offer upward mobility for everyone, whereas U.S. born are more rooted in place.

Taking a short-term view of immigrants understates their success, and when you take a longer-term view, look at the children, then they are doing remarkably well.

And that’s not very surprising. It is not reflecting badly on the U.S. born. But if you think about it, if you are born in a certain place in the United States, your parents were born there, your grandparents were born there, moving to opportunity for you means moving away from home. Whereas immigrants, they already left home for a new country, and so they may as well choose a place within that new country that offers upward mobility, where they are needed, and that offers good education and opportunities for them and their children. That location choice ended up being a big part of the difference between immigrants and nonimmigrants.

When we compare the children of immigrants to the children of the U.S. born in the same location, we find that the immigrant advantage all but disappears. So it is not that the children of immigrants in New York are doing better than the children of the U.S. born in New York, but it is that the children of immigrants are more likely to move to New York rather than Detroit.

What myth about U.S. immigration troubles you the most?

Myths, in general, bother me because I’m very comfortable with people having different opinions and outlooks about immigration and immigration policy when they look at the same piece of evidence. What bothers me is that we don’t have shared facts that we can at least agree on, and then argue about what to do with them.

One that bothers me that we didn’t talk about so far is this idea that the attitudes toward immigrants are very, very bad now in the United States—that everybody used to like immigrants, because they were so great, but now attitudes are more negative towards immigration.

This is a topic that we worked on with a group of linguists at Stanford. We have a new paper out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where we analyzed congressional speeches and presidential speeches. We looked at all the 8 million speeches, 200,000 of which are about immigration, going back to the 1870s. We asked how attitudes toward immigration changed over the last century and a half.

What we find is that attitudes toward immigrants today are as positive as they ever were in U.S. history. If you look at the past, 100 years ago, it will be hard for you to find a positive speech about immigrants. Immigration speeches moved from mostly negative to on average positive in one single generation, just after the Second World War from 1945 to 1965. Then, even though starting in 1965 with the Immigration Act immigrants started to come from different countries, from Latin America, from Asia, rather than mostly from Europe, that positive attitude toward immigration remained all the way until today. On average, today, immigration speeches are more positive than ever.

Of course, they are also more polarized by political parties. Today, Republicans are more likely to make negative speeches about immigrants—they tend to refer to words like crime and illegal in their speeches when they talk about immigrants. Democrats talk more about family and contribution when they speak about immigrants. But this idea that attitudes toward immigration are worse than ever is just not true.

If you look at a Gallup survey from 2021, 75 percent of Americans say that immigration is a good thing to the United States. I think that means that public attitudes are more positive toward immigrants than you might think. And it will be great if there will be a politician that is brave enough to adopt a more positive take on immigration policy, because we think that more of the public might support such policy than might appear by the myth that attitudes are very negative.

The post A New Look at the History of U.S. Immigration: A Conversation with Ran Abramitzky appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

The country is once again called upon to come to terms with its slave past, a call that has aggravated the deep polarization into which we have descended. For many decades, economic historians have grappled with economic dimensions of slavery, addressing such questions as: Was slavery profitable? Was slave labor as productive as free labor? What were the implications of slavery for regional growth and development?

In a recent essay in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, I recount what economic historians have learned from six decades of research. That survey addressed such issues as interregional trade, the geography of settlement under alternative labor regimes, and the origins of regional conflict and Civil War. This brief article will focus on the role of slavery in the surge of nineteenth-century United States growth. To be clear, economics has no shortcut answers to profound questions of historic injustice and moral responsibility. But it might help to ground the debates in a fuller understanding of the historical record.

The question that has been strenuously debated is whether slavery, integral to commerce during colonial times, was also central to the acceleration of national economic growth during the first half of the nineteenth century. An insurgency known as the New History of Capitalism claims that such a connection is self-evident. Historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman assert “the impossibility of understanding the nation’s spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center.… During the eighty years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, slavery was indispensable to the economic development of the United States.” Despite the rhetorical fanfare, this proposition has been rejected by virtually every economic historian who has examined the issue. What accounts for this disciplinary divergence?

The question that has been strenuously debated is whether slavery, integral to commerce during colonial times, was also central to the acceleration of national economic growth during the first half of the nineteenth century.

First, some background. Before the American Revolution, slavery was legal and practiced in all the British colonies of the New World. The largest mainland concentrations were in the tobacco regions of Maryland and Virginia, but the institution was also significant in fertile areas of the Middle Atlantic, and in New York City, where more than 40 percent of the households held at least one enslaved person. Overall, however, mainland North America was peripheral to the larger Atlantic slave trade. Data from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database indicate that no more than 3.6 percent of coerced African migrants came to North America, prior to the Anglo-American closure of the trade in 1807.

Nonetheless, slave-based commerce was vital for these colonies. Not only was slave-grown tobacco the largest mainland export, but the British Caribbean was the largest trading partner for the northeastern colonies. To feed enslaved people on the islands, the Middle Atlantic shipped grain products, beef, and pork, while New England sent fish, whale products and lumber. In addition, two-thirds of New England’s “invisible” earnings—shipping services, warehousing, shipbuilding, and finance—arose from Caribbean commerce. Merchants enriched by this trade sometimes used their wealth to found universities. Historian Craig Steven Wilder shows that the first five colleges in British America were major beneficiaries of the slave trade and slavery. 

Not long after its new Constitution, the new nation had a new cash crop: cotton. A prime area of contention has been the nature of the link between cotton and slavery. The rise of the Cotton South was unquestionably part of national growth acceleration, but unlike sugar, cotton had no intrinsic technological or geographical links to slavery as a labor system. Had slavery been abolished in 1790 under the new Constitution—an unlikely counterfactual event, but perhaps an informative thought experiment—the cotton-focused region might have developed under a family-farm regime similar to that of the Old Northwest: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The persistence and expansion of slavery in the South does not imply that it was driven by economic imperatives, but instead offers an example of what economic historians call “path dependence”: in these areas, slavery was a “pre-existing condition,” as owners actively searched for profitable new ways to deploy their “assets.”

The persistence and expansion of slavery in the South does not imply that it was driven by economic imperatives, but instead offers an example of what economic historians call “path dependence.”

The larger point is that whether slave or free, the Cotton South was neither an integral component of nor an essential contributor to accelerated growth elsewhere in the country. In the wake of the American Revolution, the states of the northeast abolished slavery—an unintended but nonetheless historic consequence of political independence—and extended this proscription westward under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Free family farmers moved rapidly into newly opened areas, migration closely linked to investments in transportation infrastructure: first turnpikes, then canals, and finally railroads. Coalitions of urban merchants and landowners pushed infrastructure projects, eager to increase the value of their property.

One major breakthrough was the Erie Canal, approved by the New York state legislature in 1817 at the urging of Governor DeWitt Clinton, who had been mayor of New York City and member of its canal commission from 1810 to 1824. Its bonds eagerly purchased by European investors, the canal was a dramatic success, spawning a host of imitators and channeling commerce and migration decisively along east-west lines.

Fledgling American manufacturers found their most inviting markets in the prospering farm areas and growing cities of the free states. Public schools proliferated, creating one of the first mass-educated populations in the world. But not in the South. Because they possessed “captive labor,” migrating planters saw no need to recruit labor for land-clearing and other farm-building tasks. Because the economic value of enslaved people as property was largely independent of local development, planters were much less inclined to form coalitions to promote transportation investments and encourage settlement. Thus, the slave states did not comprise a major market for either western farm products or northeastern manufactured goods.

To be clear: slave labor was arduous and brutal, and slave plantations were highly successful as cotton producers. Migration into the lush soils of Mississippi and Louisiana increased productivity, augmented by new yield-increasing cotton varieties. But economic development in the slave South lagged behind that of the free states, as the region neglected infrastructure, declined to recruit immigrants, and underinvested in schools—not only for the enslaved, for whom literacy constituted a threat to the regime, but for much of the free population. Slavery generated great wealth, but the main beneficiaries were the enslavers, not the other members of Southern society.

Economic development in the slave South lagged behind that of the free states, as the region neglected infrastructure, declined to recruit immigrants, and underinvested in schools ... Slavery generated great wealth, but the main beneficiaries were the enslavers, not the other members of Southern society.

The grain of truth in the New History of Capitalism is that many free-state businesses freely transacted with slaveholders, some providing vital services that facilitated the operation of the slave system. New York steamship companies competed vigorously for the Texas slave trade. During the boom decade of the 1830s, the Natchez (Mississippi) branch of the Bank of the United States offered accommodation loans to planters so lavishly that the bank found itself in possession of numerous slaves and several plantations after the financial collapse of 1839. These and others were clearly complicit in the perpetuation and expansion of slavery. Such complicity surely deserves moral rebuke, but it is very different from the claim that slavery was the driving force behind the acceleration of national economic growth.

A final note: The historical interpretation sketched here has no direct bearing on the debate over reparations or other proposed responses to racial injustice in U.S. history. The direct gains from slavery were largely captured by owners, but responsibility for this state of affairs is national, beginning with the Constitution of 1789, reaffirmed by the Reconstruction Amendments that followed the Civil War. The promise of this “new birth of freedom” has yet to be fully realized.

The post Slavery and Economic Growth in the Early United States appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

When Democrat Jon Ossoff of Georgia was sworn into office in January 2021, becoming one of the youngest senators in US history, he carried in his breast pocket a copy of two ship manifests: one for his paternal great-grandfather, Israel Osshowsky, who arrived in the United States in 1911, and one for his great-grandmother, Annie, who joined her husband in the United States in 1913. Later that day, Ossoff mentioned this sentimental gesture on social media, marveling that “a century later, their great grandson was elected to the U.S. Senate.” This is the promise of America, Ossoff implied, that the sons and daughters of immigrants from all around the world can rise to the halls of power.

As economic historians who study the past with the hope of illuminating the present, we took special note of the manner that Ossoff chose to honor his ancestors: not with a sepia-toned photograph or a family heirloom but with passenger records, listing his great-grandparents by name at the very moment they set foot on American shores.

After his swearing in, we couldn’t help but look up Ossoff’s great-grandfather in the historical census records on Ancestry.com, a source that we have turned to many times over the years. We found that by 1920, Israel Osshowsky had already changed his last name to Ossoff and was living with his wife, Annie, and their five young children in Peabody, Massachusetts, where he worked as a laborer in a leather factory.

By leaving Lithuania for Peabody, Israel Ossoff had likely already doubled his fortunes. A century ago, poverty was higher in many European countries than in the United States, so immigrants had a lot to gain by crossing the Atlantic. Escaping their financial plight was what 44 percent of immigrants who arrived during this period reported as the reason they came to America, while 34 percent were following family members and 20 percent were fleeing persecution, according to details gathered by the Ellis Island Foundation.

Looking at historical census data gives an even better fix on the financial value of moving versus staying home. In one of our research projects, we followed pairs of brothers born in Norway, one of whom left for the United States by 1900 while the other remained behind. (We focused on Norway because the Norwegian census data happens to be highly complete.) Brothers who immigrated to the United States earned nearly twice as much as their siblings back home.

When we turn to the big data, we find that many of Americans’ widely held beliefs about immigrant success do not stand up to scrutiny.

The best estimates suggest that much the same is true today: immigrants can more than double their earnings by moving to the United States. So the impetus to immigrate is as strong as ever. It’s only the countries that are different: you don’t see many immigrants from Norway to the United States these days because Norway has become one of the richest nations in the world, with a higher median income per person than the United States. Today, most immigrants hail from countries that, relative to the United States, are far poorer than European home countries were a century ago. Consider the fact that nine of the ten countries sending the largest numbers of immigrants to the United States these days are ranked between the 90th and 150th countries in the world in terms of GDP per capita (out of 195)—countries like El Salvador, India, and Vietnam. Korea is the only large immigration partner that cracks the top 50.

Our research shows that crossing the Atlantic in the past—or the Rio Grande today—is the biggest step on immigrants’ ladder of upward economic mobility. In this way, America really does have golden streets that allow newcomers to quickly make more than they could have earned at home.

But we also find that moving up the economic ladder in America—and catching up to the U.S. born—takes time. Nearly a decade after arrival, Israel Ossoff was still working as a laborer, a job that today would probably earn the minimum wage. Census records indicate that ten years later, he reported being in the “express business,” with a truck that hauled leather goods from the factory in Peabody. It was only by 1940, close to thirty years after his first arrival, that Israel converted this small business into ownership of a local gas station.

How immigrants paved their way to American prosperity

Although Jon Ossoff himself is an outlier for ending up on Capitol Hill, his family is a good illustration of our work tracing the rising fortunes of immigrant families through historical data. The Ossoffs represent only one entry in our larger ledger, a dataset that follows millions of immigrant families through historical census records from their arrival onward. The very power of such large datasets is that we do not need to rely on the recollections of a small number of immigrants who left diaries or memoirs, and we do not need to wonder whether a particular story is typical or an exception.

Indeed, when we turn to the big data, we find that many of Americans’ widely held beliefs about immigrant success do not stand up to scrutiny. One of our nation’s triumphal myths is that immigrants arriving at Ellis Island a century ago with only a few dollars in their pocket could quickly achieve prosperity through their own hard work and ingenuity. Indeed, many older academic studies—conducted using the sparse information that was available at the time—supported the view that immigrants in the past were able to catch up to the U.S. born remarkably quickly, matching and surpassing their earnings within a few years. By comparison with this rapid ascent, today’s immigrants seem to be lagging behind.

But our data tell a different story. In our book, Streets of Gold, we provide evidence that revise myths about immigration in three major ways. First, the nostalgic view of immigrants in the past moving quickly from rags to riches does not fit the facts. Second, newcomers today are just as quick to move up the economic ladder as in the past, and immigrants now are integrating into American culture just as surely as immigrants did back then. And finally, immigrant success does not come at the expense of U.S.-born workers.

Immigrants in the past did not rise from poverty to comfort as quickly as we believe, nor are today’s immigrants climbing the economic ladder any more slowly than past immigrants.

The lives that immigrants lead after arriving in the United States have never been as easy as the common nostalgic view. Many of the historical immigrants that we follow through the data were slow to climb up the economic ladder. Often, the move from low-paid jobs to higher-paid positions took a whole lifetime, and many immigrants never caught up to U.S.-born workers in their occupations or earnings.

In the pace of their economic progress, immigrants of the past were very similar to immigrants today. Immigrants in the past did not rise from poverty to comfort as quickly as we believe, nor are today’s immigrants climbing the economic ladder any more slowly than past immigrants. We will see that the story of Israel Ossoff’s slow progress can very well be told of immigrant families today.

The true ascent for immigrant families happens in the next generation. The children of immigrants, like in Jon Ossoff ’s family, achieve incredible economic success—a pattern that has held in the United States for more than a century. We find in the data that the children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially children of poor immigrants, are more upwardly mobile than the children of U.S.-born residents. The children of immigrants from El Salvador are as likely to be economically successful nowadays as were the children of immigrants from Great Britain 150 years ago.

All in all, we find a common immigrant story of strong economic mobility in both the past and the present. This shared immigrant experience is all the more remarkable given the dramatic changes in immigration policy over time. A century ago, immigrants from Europe and Canada did not require a visa or passport for entry, nor did they need to prove that they had a family member or a job waiting for them (although immigrants from Asia faced many more restrictions). Today, immigrant entry is highly restricted, and many immigrants arrive without documents. But the bottom line remains the same: the American Dream is just as real for immigrants from Asia and Latin America now as it was for immigrants from Italy and Russia one hundred years ago.

Our findings are decidedly more optimistic than other studies that have warned that the children of immigrants from poor countries might be on a path to a permanent underclass. Being raised in America is a great equalizer for immigrant children from many ethnic backgrounds, and parents’ country of origin need not be destiny. But one important factor makes us less optimistic: race. As a group, children of Black parents have lower upward mobility than children of white parents, and we find a similar pattern in our data when comparing children of immigrants from Caribbean countries with children of immigrants from Europe or from Asia. But here, too, we find some room for optimism. Many children of immigrants from majority-Black countries (particularly daughters) do remarkably well.

Our data also busts another widely held myth: that today’s immigrants are slower to embrace American culture and society than were European immigrants in the past. The data shows that current immigrants do not assimilate into US society any more slowly than past immigrants. Both in the past and today, immigrants make tremendous efforts to join American society. We document the process of cultural assimilation in large datasets using a variety of measures: Do immigrants become fluent in English? Do they leave immigrant enclaves and move to more integrated neighborhoods? Do immigrants or their children marry spouses from other countries of origin or who were born in the United States?

In one generation’s time, we find that it becomes hard to tell apart the children of immigrants from the children of the U.S. born. Both groups are simply American.

What we find across all these measures is that the pace of cultural assimilation is very similar in the past and present. Not only that, the immigrant groups most accused of unwillingness to assimilate—Southern and Eastern Europeans in the past, Mexicans today— actually tended to assimilate the fastest. And, contrary to common concerns that refugees will remain isolated, we find that refugees assimilate even faster than other immigrants.

The story that emerges when we let the data speak is a happy one, a tale of economic prosperity and cultural integration. In one generation’s time, we find that it becomes hard to tell apart the children of immigrants from the children of the U.S. born. Both groups are simply American.

Immigration does not harm the U.S. born

Yet, simply knowing that immigrants themselves eventually thrive is not the end of the story. What if newcomers squeeze out existing residents for jobs or housing or access to public services? In that case, it would be hard to justify the number of immigrants currently entering the country—let alone an increase in immigration.

Indeed, many politicians defend immigration restrictions as a means of supporting the American worker. If we block new immigration, the idea goes, there will be more jobs for the U.S. born. Yet, when we look to the evidence—either for the past or the present—we do not find that immigrants steal the last slice from a fixed pie. Rather, immigrants help the economy grow, contributing to science, innovation, and culture.

To be sure, immigration creates some winners and losers in the labor market—but only in the short term. U.S.-born workers who do the same types of jobs that immigrants tend to face more competition for jobs. But today, immigrants often fill roles that have few available U.S.-born workers: either very highly educated positions in tech and science, or work that requires very little education, such as picking crops by hand, washing dishes, landscaping, and taking care of the elderly. In fact, the workers who can lose out the most in the short term from new immigrant arrivals are not U.S.-born workers but immigrants who themselves came to the United States a few years before.

These days, research into episodes of immigration restriction or new immigrant entry strongly rejects the zero-sum idea that immigrant workers steal American jobs. Immigration policy is not as easy as saying “close the border and jobs will come.” Instead, as a nation we should focus on the ways in which immigrants promote a growing economy, with jobs available for all, rather than imagine that there is a fixed set of jobs to divide between immigrants and the U.S. born. The important role of immigration in contributing to population growth is all the more critical now that we are in the midst of what census watchers call “demographic stagnation.” To continue building the labor force, immigration is essential for filling key jobs in health care, tech, construction, and manufacturing.

We need to design our immigration policy at the level of generations; the immigrants of today are the Americans of tomorrow.

As a country, we are in dire need of shared facts about immigration. Too often, rational discussion of immigration is overwhelmed by anecdotes that can slant the narrative in one direction or another. It is easy to get influenced by daily headlines of a “crisis” at the southern border, which can stoke fears that the country is being overrun by newcomers. As a result, voters overestimate the number of immigrants living in the country and underestimate immigrants’ economic contributions, assuming that more immigrants are dependent on welfare than really do use government benefits. Our large datasets comparing immigrants in the past and present bring new evidence to the national discussion on immigration policy.

We realize that different people can reach different conclusions from the same facts. Even to those who are convinced that immigration is good for America, more immigration isn’t always better. It would be facile to say that US policy should maximize the number of immigrants. Thus, we do not seek to give simplistic policy solutions.

Our main message is more basic: as a society, we need to design our immigration policy at the level of generations; the immigrants of today are the Americans of tomorrow. Taking a short-term perspective—as candidates focusing on the next election cycle often do—underestimates the potential contributions that immigrants and their children will make to the economy in the future.

It can feel, at times, like bringing facts to the table is futile. There is a vocal and emboldened minority who oppose immigration under the mantle of America First. But the data conveys a clear message: immigration is good for America, and immigrants and their children ultimately become Americans, both then and now.

This article has been excerpted from Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan. Copyright © 2022. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The post Revising America’s Immigration Myths, Past and Present appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

As I walked through the night market in Taipei, the smell of
spices and grilled pork filled my nose. The colorful array of pineapples and
mangoes caught my eye. It was loud, but not too loud. A constant hum of hungry
pedestrians and shopkeepers could be heard up and down the market. With a
series of hand gestures and broken Chinese, I ordered a bowl of congee (rice
porridge). I walked to nearby table and sat down to enjoy my meal while
watching the action around me.  

But this isn’t how I typically
buy my food. At my grocery store in Kyoto, Japan, I wander the aisles of
packaged items and perfectly placed produce. I see bright red tomatoes, apples, and nicely wrapped
slices of meat in refrigerated cases, no matter the season. There’s little chance
to smell or taste samples. Nor is there much communication. There is simply no
need to speak or interact with other people.

Shopping with my eyes is second nature to me. But I could be using so
many more senses.

How we buy food changed
dramatically over the past century and a half. For many, particularly in the industrialized world,
buying food has become a one-dimensional experience based primarily on looks.
As a business historian, I found myself intrigued by the disconnection between what
we experience when we purchase food and what we experience and value when we’re
eating food—the smells, tastes, textures, and, of course, sight. How did visual
information come to be king? And what do we lose with our other senses
relegated to the sidelines?

Shopping with my eyes is second nature to me. But I could be using so many more senses.

As I investigated, I discovered people’s
sensory experience in food shopping and eating changed as a product of complex
interplay between advances in science and business, how those advances were
reflected by our attitude toward nature, and the introduction of new political
and economic powers. Over time, the forces of industrialization
and standardization pushed for a bright, uniform look of food available year-round,
exposing people to new visual and taste experiences. But this
came at a cost to the other senses and diminished more localized relationships
with food.

Eye appeal has become buy appeal.
But why and how? A history of how they became connected provides insight into the
transformation of people’s relationships with food, nature, and society.

Back in time: From a market to a
supermarket

If you lived in late nineteenth-century New York City, you
would have likely purchased your food at a public market, where you could see
and touch produce, smell combinations of the foods and spices for sale, and speak
to sellers and other customers. In this multisensorial environment, you would
have discerned the quality of foods through their appearance, smell, and
texture, and through communication.

Meanwhile, in a regular grocery store, your sensory access to food may have been relatively limited. A store clerk would usually retrieve goods for you from a shelf behind the counter. And although grocery stores sold some perishable foods, their major food trade was canned and other processed products. After stopping by the grocery, you would make your way to the butcher shop and then the produce shop, which would have been separate.

Beginning in the 1920s, large grocery stores began absorbing
neighboring butcher shops and produce stores. By the mid twentieth century, you
would be shopping in grocery stores similar to what you’d be familiar with
today. Stores that carried everything you need—butcher, baker, produce, and
packaged items. Bright lights and colorful displays, aisles and aisles of options,
carefully displayed and enthusiastically marketed.

Standardizing the senses

This change in our sensory experience involved a shift in the
entire food chain from producers to distributors and retailers since the late
nineteenth century. The United States was then at the forefront of the
industrialization of agriculture and food processing, the emergence of the
food-coloring business, and the growth of a modern food retailing system. The
early development of the mass production and mass marketing of foods proved
particularly conducive to the standardization of food colors.

With rapid industrialization and market expansion in the United States from the 1870s on, agricultural producers and food processors sought to streamline production, emphasizing efficiency, consistency, and standardization. Through this shift many consumers attained an unprecedented variety of foods. Mass production, long-distance transportation systems, and refrigeration technology meant a wider variety of both agricultural and processed products reached a broader population. But sensory experiences became increasingly uniform and predictable. A bag of apples, a box of breakfast cereal, and a tub of margarine invariably offered consumers from Los Angeles to New York the same color and the same flavor.

For many, particularly in the industrialized world, buying food has become a one-dimensional experience based primarily on looks.

Prioritizing our visual experience was key for this shift. Color
turned out to be easier to control, reproduce, and commoditize than did other
sensory factors. The smell of food, for example, was difficult to convey in
print or other media. Color served as a powerful communication tool for the
food industry not only to appeal to the eyes of consumers but also to stimulate
gustatory, olfactory, and tactile sensations.

Farmers, food processors, dye manufacturers, government
officials, and intermediate suppliers began devoting enormous resources to
determine and create the “right” color of foods, which many consumers would
recognize and, in time, take for granted.

Manufacturing “natural” and “fresh”

Seeking to create
uniform, bright colors as the sign of succulent fruits and vegetables, growers
and packers tended to prioritize the appearance of their produce over the
actual taste.
Several studies conducted in the 1920s and 1930s suggested that produce
artificially ripened with ethylene gas (a gas that helped fasten a ripening
process of fruits and vegetables) did not develop full flavor due to a lower
sugar content than those ripened on the plant. One study, for instance, showed
that tomatoes ripened by ethylene remained solid for a longer period than did
vine-ripened fruits. The firm fruit was easy to transport and looked good, but
it came at the expense of flavor and texture.

One example from the Florida citrus industry shows even more complicated relations between taste and color. Orange growers sought to create a color to “match” the taste of food that consumers expected, or what growers believed consumers wanted. A certain variety of oranges grown in the state ripened without change in skin color due to the climate. Growers believed that these green oranges would not sell in the national market even if the fruit was perfectly ripe; they hence began coloring the skin orange with synthetic dyes in the early 1930s. By the mid-1940s, nearly 70 percent of fresh oranges shipped out of the state were colored with dyes.

Seeking to create uniform, bright colors as the sign of succulent fruits and vegetables, growers and packers tended to prioritize the appearance of their produce over the actual taste.

This citrus coloring practice caused an uproar among the public, as well as the federal government, leading to a Supreme Court case in 1958 (the case concerned the safety of the dye used for coloring oranges). Some government officials considered the use of dye unacceptable while they insisted that ethylene treatment was legitimate as it simply enhanced a “natural” process. Meanwhile, consumers criticized the coloring practice as the deception of consumers, believing (sometimes stubbornly) that ripe oranges should look naturally orange, although green color was the “natural” color of oranges in this case. With industrialization and mechanization of agriculture—embodying what Leo Marx dubbed “the machine in the garden”—the line between the natural and the artificial, particularly in the case of agricultural produce, became increasingly difficult to draw.

Creating “natural” and “fresh” color was important also for processed foods like cured meat products. Since the nineteenth century, meatpackers had been using synthetic dyes in sausages and other meat products to give them a “fresh” red shade. Later, in the mid twentieth century, chemical companies introduced various additives, such as preservatives and antioxidant additives, for preventing cured meats from discoloring. Dyes and preservatives made meat products “chemically fresh” and provided retailers with more stable and reliable ways of manipulating the freshness of foods than refrigeration and packaging.

A colorful centerpiece

“We do our gardening in the grocery or delicatessen, and in
our selection of foods odor and taste have taken an inferior place to sight,”
noted a U.S. Department Agriculture scientist in 1929. By then, colorful
vegetables and fruits and bright red meat became the centerpiece of the store
to visually attract shoppers. Grocers believed that the appearance of displays
was the most important factor in appealing to consumers and moving stocks of
fruits and vegetables, and that the attractive display of agricultural produce
influenced the ambience of the entire store. They thus arranged the produce
section in the best position in the store—usually near the entrance.

One 1930s grocery journal gave grocers advice on how to make a produce section visually attractive:

"Place alternate rows of reds, whites, greens and yellows. Make narrow alternating bands or piles of red radishes, lettuce, carrots, spinach and celery, etc. that will give the appearance of so many colored ribbons. Arrange your fruits the same way, alternating masses of oranges, grapefruit, apples, lemons, tangerines and pears so that the contrasting colors will catch the shopper’s eye." (Progressive Grocer, September 1935)

One grocer asserted that when each item was shown “in mass
arrangement with special consideration for freshness and color contrast,”
customers could not “resist buying liberally.”

The colors of produce and meat were important for grocery store operation not only because they brightened up store interiors and attracted consumers, but also because they served as a critical indicator of food quality, which determined whether a customer would buy a particular item.

Streamlining social interactions

While modern groceries became a vision-centered environment,
they also streamlined our social interactions. In self-service stores, we wander
around the store independently.

The introduction of the first self-service merchandising is attributed to Clarence Saunders’s Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1917. When self-service was a novel system in the 1920s and 1930s, neither consumers nor store clerks were fully satisfied with the system. Both wanted face-to-face interactions when necessary. In fact, grocers commonly kept service-type operation to some extent, say in the deli department. But over-time, many of these interactions gave way to self-service too. By the end of the 1950s, self-service had become the common way of buying foods in the United States. As a consequence, we rely more on our eyes in selecting foods than on assistance from specialists, like butchers, fishmongers, and produce sellers (except at specialty stores).

Uniformly bright red meat, brilliant green spinach, and shining red tomatoes, sealed in transparent film and displayed in sanitized cases, came to embody the aesthetics of “freshness” in modern self-service supermarkets.

Technological advances after WWII further emphasized sight.
Fluorescent light meant food could remain brightly light and wouldn’t spoil
(incandescent bulbs gave off heat). Transparent packaging like cellophane
ostensibly allowed consumers to see the “true” appearance of foods through the package. And refrigeration slowed
the spoilage of perishable food such as meat and vegetables, helping both keep
their “fresh” colors. Consumers could now see the foods, but all their other
senses were blinded.

Uniformly bright red meat, brilliant green spinach, and shining red tomatoes, sealed in transparent film and displayed in sanitized cases, came to embody the aesthetics of “freshness” in modern self-service supermarkets. The bright color of perishable items sealed in transparent film and displayed in refrigerated cases, represented what Susanne Freidberg called “industrial freshness” in the place where nature and technology intersected.

Now, we often make assumptions about food quality based
largely on how they look, rather than factors that affect taste and nutritional
quality, such as how much time has passed after fruits and vegetables were
harvested and meat was cut.

Consequences of the emphasis on appearance

This creation of the visual hegemony in our food systems has had multifaceted consequences. The emphasis on vision, as well as the standardization of color, made “nature” more accessible to a broader range of people. For example, scientific engineering at the turn of the twentieth century made canned foods available to both lower- and upper-class consumers as an alternative to “fresh” foods throughout the year—canners even argued that canned foods were fresher than “the fresh articles.” The introduction of synthetic dyes enabled citrus growers to provide bright orange oranges as a product of nature with wider consumers than before.

This “democratization,” however, engendered inequalities in health risks.
Cheaper food products, including low-grade canned foods, at the time were more
likely to contain cheap, sometimes poisonous, coloring substances. Consumers
who could not afford expensive and reliable foods were more exposed to the risk
of health hazards.

A luscious, uniform look of fruits and vegetables on a supermarket shelf also came with environmental implications. Seeking a uniform look, fruit shipping companies, such as United Fruit, began mass-producing one banana variety, leading to a monoculture system that devastated the land, as well as the health of workers (see John Soluri’s fascinating book Banana Cultures).

The emphasis on appearance in selling food, among other reasons, contributes to substantial food waste. Every year, 40 percent of food is wasted in the United States. That includes 20 billion pounds of produce that is not even harvested, left on farms because it doesn’t meet grade standards, including shape and color.

To address this problem, a new generation of entrepreneurs launched the “ugly food” business in the mid-2010s. Companies like Misfits Market, Imperfect Foods, and Hungry Harvest sell fruits and vegetables with blemishes and deformed shapes, such as off-color apples, crooked cucumbers, and oversize peppers.

But not everyone is impressed by their mission. One of them is Sarah Taber, who argues that reducing waste by selling ugly produce would not solve the problem. To be clear, she is not against the ugly food business or ugly food per se. She sees their narrative as a myth, noting that farmers and food processors have already been using mis-shaped and discolored produce as ingredients for processed products such as juice and salsa. It is “you” who are “tossing perfectly good produce.”

“If you’re buying ugly produce and it’s working for you, that’s fine,” Taber says. “But you should not feel obligated to buy ugly fruit because someone told you it’s going to save the world. It’s not. It’s just supporting someone’s business model.”

But the fact that there is a business modeled on selling imperfect produce suggests the current interest (though still a minority) in a movement away from a uniform, bright look of fruits and vegetables, at least among those who created the business and those who buy their produce. Whether this interest in ugly food becomes a new normal, and helps enhance diversity and sustainability in the ecosystem and our lives, is yet to be seen.

The rise of the online grocer

There is a new trend that could transform our sensory experience in food shopping entirely—the rise of e-commerce. Between 2016 and 2018, the online grocery market value doubled, accounting for nearly $30 billion, although e-commerce remains a small segment in the entire grocery business. The majority of consumers are not willing to buy their fresh foods online. Many of them want to see, touch, and smell the actual food (however limited their sensory access in a conventional supermarket may be), and pick their food by themselves. Over the past several months, however, online grocery sales increased substantially, reaching $6.6 billion in May 2020 (a 24 percent increase from the previous months). The coronavirus pandemic could accelerate how quickly people buy into online grocery shopping.

The virtual grocery store could change not only how we buy foods but also how we understand what we eat, possibly shifting the food landscape even more drastically than the birth of self-service stores a century ago.

The online grocery store, relying almost exclusively on stock photos of
the food, offers even more convenience and even less sensory information—let
alone social interactions. The
virtual grocery store could change not only how we buy foods but also how we
understand what we eat, possibly shifting the food landscape even more
drastically than the birth of self-service stores a century ago.

When it comes to food, changes in science and business over the last
century and a half elevated sight above the other senses, taste in particular.
The emergence of mass production, industrialization, and self-service
merchandising helped the food business create and standardize a “natural” color
for food, both processed and agricultural. The emphasis on color altered not
only how people buy food but also how they interact with others and how they
think of nature in modern capitalist society. Appealing to the senses and
reinventing what consumers wanted became a crucial part of manufacturing and
marketing practices to whet consumers’ appetites. A history of this creation of
a new sensory world provides a new way of seeing
the past, present, and future of food.

The post How Sight—Not Taste, Smell, or Touch—Became the Sense of the Supermarket appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

At daybreak on November 1, 1755—All
Saints’ Day—Lisbon was Europe’s fourth largest city and one of its most
important commercial centers. By the afternoon, three natural disasters had
reduced the city to rubble and ash. The first wave of devastation came in the
form of an 8.5-magnitude earthquake, the largest to have ever hit a major
European city. In the second wave, a great fire, caused by all the overturned
candles, which had been lit in observance of the religious festival, devoured
thousands of homes and other buildings. Finally, the smoldering city was
inundated by a trio of tidal waves more than sixty feet high that the
earthquake had pushed up from the ocean floor. All told, forty thousand of
Lisbon’s residents were killed and more than 80 percent of its buildings were
damaged or destroyed. By sunset, Portugal was paupered, and one of the most
important centers of the international economy was a rock quarry. In today’s
dollars, the total loss would amount to
the damages inflicted by a hundred Hurricane Katrinas.

Modern Europe had never before experienced a natural disaster on the scale of Lisbon, so its effects went beyond the death toll and the immediate economic impacts: the Great Lisbon Disaster also had deep conceptual effects. “The eighteenth century used the word Lisbon much as we use the word Auschwitz today,” wrote the philosopher Susan Neiman. For decades, people throughout Europe and the New World walked around with the “Lisbon Question” on their lips: If horrors like Lisbon can happen, what kind of world are we living in? And how should we live in it? Lisbon drastically altered how nineteenth-century people thought about their relationship to nature, and about how to brace themselves against nature’s enormity and caprice. It also revolutionized how they thought about their ethical obligations to suffering people in distant lands. We are the heirs of this conceptual revolution, which the political scientist Michael Barnett has named the “Humanitarian Big Bang.”

For decades, people throughout Europe and the New World walked around with the “Lisbon Question” on their lips: If horrors like Lisbon can happen, what kind of world are we living in? And how should we live in it?

Lisbon drastically altered how nineteenth-century people thought about their relationship to nature, and about how to brace themselves against nature’s enormity and caprice. It also revolutionized how they thought about their ethical obligations to suffering people in distant lands.

A
prototype for international assistance

We
remember the horrors of Lisbon much better than we remember the outpouring of
concern from Portugal’s neighbors, but pour out their concern they did. As soon
as Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen María Bárbara (the brother-in-law and
sister of Portugal’s King José I) learned of the disaster, they dispatched
orders to send supplies, along with the equivalent of about £37,000 in cash
($10.2 million in today’s dollars). Three weeks after the disaster, when the
news reached France (at the time, news traveled by horseback at less than four
miles per hour), King Louis XV offered £16,600 ($4.6 million in today’s
dollars) in aid (though Portugal’s king politely declined it, probably from
fear of provoking his English allies).

Speaking
of England, as soon as King George II received the news, he directed Britain’s
prime minister to come up with a plan for sending relief as well. Only days
later, a British man-of-war set sail for Lisbon with £50,000 in gold and silver
and nearly £50,000 in food, tools, and clothes, along with three warships to protect
Lisbon from pirates. Another £100,000 would follow ten days after that. In
total, Britain’s contribution was worth $55 million in today’s dollars. News of
Lisbon’s decimation reached Hamburg, Portugal’s second most important trading
partner after Britain, exactly four weeks after the catastrophe. Within two
weeks, a supply ship left Hamburg laden with relief supplies. Three more were
sent soon thereafter. Collectively, Hamburg’s four ships
delivered
£160,000 ($44 million in today’s dollars) in money, food, and goods.

The
supportive responses from Spain, France, Britain, and Hamburg were a great
surprise to the Portuguese. On one hand, certainly, it’s easy to see the
varieties of self-interest—love of family, concern for one’s citizens and
assets in foreign lands, and eagerness to purchase friendship and favor—that
may have motivated Portugal’s neighbors to get involved. “Humanitarian concerns
existed,” the historian Mark Molesky acknowledged in This Gulf
of Fire,

"but they were intermingled with political and economic interests. The city of Hamburg, for example, was motivated to send aid to alleviate the suffering of both the Portuguese and its own merchants, as well as to secure its position as Lisbon’s second most important trading partner. Spain was moved by the close familial ties between the two royal couples and, perhaps, to gain some political leverage over the Portuguese. France’s offer of aid most likely reflected both the personal influence of Madame de Pompadour and a clever, albeit unsuccessful, attempt to encourage Portugal to remain neutral (i.e., not help Britain) during the imminent conflict."

Even
so, the international response was unprecedented. In the zero-sum view of international relations that
reigned at that time, most states would have seen Portugal’s loss as their
gain. Not that most sovereigns would have wanted to humiliate themselves
by accepting foreign assistance anyway. “For reasons of national pride and a
jealous sense of sovereignty,” wrote historian
Nicholas Shrady in The Last Day,

“the notion of foreign relief would previously have been unthinkable. By 1755, however, military and political alliances, mutual commercial interests, and improvements in travel and communications had made the states of Europe interdependent, and the Lisbon earthquake struck a chord of collective, if not universal, compassion.”

In the zero-sum view of international relations that reigned at that time, most states would have seen Portugal’s loss as their gain.

The
international response to the Great Lisbon Disaster was a case study in what
could happen when nations took an interest in other nations’ welfare, inspiring
some political theorists to propose that nations might have ethical
responsibilities to each other. This notion was a major theme in Emmerich de
Vattel’s 1758 masterpiece, The Law of Nations, published only a
few years after the disaster. Vattel argued that natural law confers the same
rights on states, and imposes the same obligations on states, as it confers and
imposes on individuals. Just as natural law affords equal dignity to all
individual human beings, makes individual people so interdependent that they
must live in societies in order to flourish, and obligates individual people to
concern themselves with other individuals’ welfare, it also affords equal
dignity to all states, makes states interdependent in order to flourish, and
obligates states to concern themselves with other states’ welfare. Vattel
called these obligations the Offices of Humanity: “One state owes to another
state whatever it owes to itself, so far as that other stands in real need of
its assistance, and the former can grant it without neglecting the duties it
owes to itself.” In illustrating how to execute those offices, Vattel wrote
admiringly of Spain’s and England’s assistance after the Lisbon disaster.

According
to Vattel, the Offices of Humanity extended far beyond disaster relief,
however: natural law also obligated nations to assist each other in developing
their political, economic, and human capabilities:

A state is more or less perfect, as it is more or less adapted to attain the end of civil society, which consists in procuring for its members everything of which they stand in need, for the necessities, the conveniences and enjoyments of life, and for their happiness in general—in providing for the peaceful enjoyment of property, and the safe and easy administration of justice—and, finally, in defending itself against all foreign violence. Every nation therefore should occasionally, and according to its power, contribute, not only to put another nation in possession of these advantages, but likewise to render it capable of procuring them itself. Accordingly, a learned nation, if applied to for masters and teachers in the sciences, by another nation desirous of shaking off its native barbarism, ought not to refuse such a request. A nation whose happiness it is to live under wise laws, should, on occasion, make it a point of duty to communicate them.

Theistic
interpretations give way to naturalistic ones

Lisbon also marks a turning point in how we explain natural disasters. Before Lisbon, large natural disasters were customarily viewed as God’s rebukes for humanity’s hubris and sin. Following the Great Fire of London, for instance, which in 1666 laid waste to most of the old city of London, preachers of every denomination exhorted Londoners to repent for the many varieties of iniquity that had provoked God into torching the city. After Lisbon, however, people increasingly came to see natural disasters as the outcomes of long chains of interaction between matter and energy—that is, as purely physical events that were uninterested in human morality and indifferent to human welfare. The transition from supernatural explanations to naturalistic ones was not easy to make because it required people to turn their backs on strong intuitions and firmly held religious convictions.

Before Lisbon, large natural disasters were customarily viewed as God’s rebukes for humanity’s hubris and sin. After Lisbon, however, people increasingly came to see natural disasters as the outcomes of long chains of interaction between matter and energy, uninterested in human morality and indifferent to human welfare.

For
most people throughout most of history, supernatural explanations for
earthquakes were the only ones that made any sense. Even today, earthquakes,
tsunamis, and other natural disasters can lead to outbreaks
of religious fervor
as people try to find some meaning in them and figure out how they ought to
respond. Psychologists have discovered two features of human cognition that
explain why we so readily turn to religious explanations.

First,
there is our tendency to explain natural phenomena in terms of preferences,
goals, and desires—that is, in terms of the same causal forces we use to
explain the behavior of humans and other animals. Under the right laboratory
conditions, children, college students, and even scientists with PhDs can be
made to reveal their preferences for goal-based explanations for natural
occurrences. For example, when we don’t have enough time for reflection, we’re
more likely to endorse the idea that hurricanes circulate sea water in order to
gather heat energy for themselves, or that the Earth has an ozone layer in
order to protect the Earth from the damaging effects of ultraviolet rays.
Because of our affinity for goal-based explanations, the psychologist Deborah
Kelemen has proposed that we are intuitive teleologists (from the Greek
word telos, which means “end, goal,
or purpose”). If you ask why Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, a fire, and
a tsunami, an intuitive teleologist concludes that something or someone must
have wanted it destroyed.

Second,
there is our penchant for just-world thinking, which involves the intuitive belief
that some sort of karma-like force brings us happiness and misery in proportion
to the good things and the bad things we have done. When bad things happen to
others, our just-world
ruminations
lead us to wonder what they might have done to deserve them. When we conclude
that they are in fact not responsible for their plights, we feel that an
injustice has been done, and we try to help them. Conversely, when we hold them
responsible for their plights—perhaps because we think they took unnecessary
risks, failed to take reasonable precautions, or offended God—we feel callous
or angry toward them, and we are content to let
them suffer.

In
light of our tendencies toward intuitive teleology and just-world thinking, it
is unsurprising that Europe’s religious leaders interpreted the Lisbon disaster
as God’s punishment for human wickedness. It didn’t help, of course, that the
earthquake struck on All Saint’s Day, one of the most important holidays in the
church calendar: surely that was no coincidence. Religious writers in
non-Catholic Europe blamed
the disaster
on the Catholics’ inquisitions against suspected heretics.20 Comically, some
Catholics concluded that God had used the disaster to chastise Lisbon’s
religious leaders for being too lenient
with heretics. Where the Protestants and Catholics concurred was in their
conviction that God used Lisbon to chastise Europe’s intellectuals for their
brash confidence that science and reason could explain the natural world. The
outspoken Jesuit priest Gabriel Malagrida used his pulpit week after week to
try to bring Lisbon back to its senses, which is to say, back to a supernatural
explanation: “It is scandalous to pretend the earthquake was just a natural
event,” he preached in an exuberant
display of question-begging, “for if that be true, there is no need to repent
and try to avert the wrath of God, and not even the Devil himself could invent
a false idea more likely to lead us all to irreparable ruin.”

To
prevent that irreparable ruin, many leaders directed their people to make
amends. King George II, intuitive teleologist that he was, led Britain in a
national day of prayer and fasting. Pope Benedict XIV called the priests,
monks, and laypeople of Rome to three days of supplication. At least one parish
priest in Portugal called for nine days of religious ceremonies in hopes of
staying God’s hand. Because most people had a religious understanding of the
disaster, a religious response was the one that seemed most fitting.

Not
everyone was content to embrace the traditional theistic responses, however. Portuguese
Prime Minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, 1st Marquis of Pombal, encouraged
scientific reflection and the application of reason—cognitive activities that
would not only not breed passivity and resignation, but would also help
Lisboetas rebuild their city and prevent future misfortunes. In a research
project that some scholars have called the birth of seismology, Pombal asked
every parish priest to complete a questionnaire about the disaster. No mere
damage assessment, Pombal’s questionnaire was a serious effort to gather
scientifically meaningful data about the earthquake’s precursors, its origin,
its force, its direction of propagation, its duration, its relationship to the
tidal waves that succeeded it, and its enduring effects on the natural
landscape. No religious preamble, no questions about local rates of wickedness.
“Not only had God been left out of the picture,” wrote Nicholas Shrady,
“but an enlightened state had stepped to the fore.”

The
post-Lisbon retreat of supernatural explanations also put wind in the sails of
scientists who wanted to understand earthquakes in naturalistic terms. In the
post-Lisbon years, the official journals of Europe’s major scientific societies
published scores of scientific papers on the causes of earthquakes. Even a
young Immanuel Kant joined the burgeoning field of seismology, writing three
scientific papers about earthquakes in 1756. Although many of the natural
philosophers who were studying earthquakes continued to pay lip service to
God’s involvement, many of them also adopted a Pombaline indifference to
theistic speculations. What causes earthquakes? Kant and many of his
contemporaries made it clear that only one kind of
explanation
really mattered to them: “We have the causes under our feet.”

The retreat of supernatural explanations had one other important downstream consequence: optimism—about humanity’s place in the world, about humanity’s capacity for understanding the world, and about humanity’s capacity for improving humanity’s lot in the world.

The retreat of supernatural
explanations had one other important downstream consequence: optimism—about humanity’s
place in the world, about humanity’s capacity for understanding the world, and
about humanity’s capacity for improving humanity’s lot in the world. Post-Lisbon
optimism was different from the earlier optimism of the German philosopher
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who had reasoned that our world must be the best of
all possible worlds because it was created by a perfect and loving God. It also
differed from the earlier optimism of the deist poet Alexander Pope, who had
written in An Essay on Man that “whatever
is, is right.” Instead, post-Lisbon optimism was utterly incurious about
whether world events were good or just or part of God’s grand design. Instead,
the new optimism was grounded in the conviction that science, reason, and
large-scale international efforts could be combined to reduce human misery,
including misery in distant lands.

Excerpted from The
Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code by Michael
McCullough. Published by Basic Books July 2020. Copyright © 2020 Michael
McCullough. All rights reserved.

The post The Earthquake that Catalyzed the “Humanitarian Big Bang” appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

There is
little doubt that 2020 will be remembered as the year that the novel coronavirus
spread across the world, bringing travel, the economy, business, and life as we
know it to an abrupt halt. With no vaccine or treatments currently available
and a lack of knowledge of how the virus will behave, there is no definitive
timeline for a return to normalcy. It is not surprising that many of us,
sheltered in our homes, are trying to make sense of these very strange times,
seeking information to help us cope, prepare, and plan.

Unfortunately, some of the information we find in this search may be little more than rumor. With the spread of the virus came the rampant spread of rumors from many sources: news media, social media, neighbors, and websites. Some of these are harmless. Perhaps you read of dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice, taking up the space previously inhabited by boats. Some are wishful, like those indicating a vaccine will be available in the next few months or that gargling with salt water will stop the virus from entering the lungs. Others are divisive, like those stating that China deliberately manufactured the virus as a biological weapon. I am guessing you heard at least one of these rumors; none of them are true.

Research on rumor has an interesting history, rooted in the crisis of World War II. Examining this history provides a platform for thinking about why rumors proliferate in times of crisis and what social and behavioral science can tell us about how to control them.

Rumors
in the current pandemic

Although the word rumor is used in a variety of ways, it generally refers to stories that circulate widely, without trustworthy verification or falsification. When someone shares a story they have heard, not knowing with certainty if it is true or false, they are said to be spreading a rumor. Rumors are often differentiated from disinformation, which usually refers to the deliberate spread of a story that is untrue. Misinformation refers to stories that are untrue, but without any assumption about whether the spread of such false information is deliberate. There is, of course, strong overlap between these categories, since both misinformation and disinformation can fuel a rumor chain.

Perhaps you’ve read of dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice, that a vaccine with be available in the next few months, or that gargling with salt water with stop the virus from entering the lungs—none of this is true.

According to a recent PEW poll, 48 percent of Americans have heard false information about COVID-19, and what’s more concerning, many Americans believe it. For example, the same PEW poll found that 23 percent of Americans believed that the virus was purposefully manufactured in a laboratory. Concerns about deliberate disinformation campaigns as the source of some COVID-19 rumors have also begun to surface. Specifically, there is evidence that both China and Russia have waged disinformation campaigns pointing to the United States as the origin of the virus, with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs endorsing the theory that it was brought to Wuhan by the U.S. Army.  

Rumor has become such a problem that several government agencies have developed websites and units devoted to rumor control. FEMA recently set up a “Coronavirus Rumor Control” page on its website to “help the public distinguish between rumors and facts.” There, they present a series of myths with corresponding facts that dispute them and point readers to trusted sources for more information.

FEMA is not
alone. The Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, the U.S.
Department of Defense, and several news outlets have established similar pages,
all devoted to quelling the spread of rumor.

Why are
rumors spreading so rapidly during this pandemic, and do these methods of
control work? A look back at a wartime rumor control initiative launched by
psychologists might help answer these questions.

The
wartime origins of rumor control

When the United States entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the American public entered a psychological situation similar to our current one. They were uncertain what the war would mean for them, when it would end, or how devastating it might be. They sought information that was often simply not available or, because of wartime censorship, not provided. They were anxious and uncertain and wary of the information they were receiving from the government and the news.

Soon after,
rumors began to circulate. There were rumors of an imminent defeat or victory,
government officials taking pleasure drives in a time of gasoline rationing,
and the value of future war bonds. These rumors were concerning, since public
support for the war and compliance with wartime restrictions was necessary.
Further, there was concern that the growing rumor mill could help to spread
enemy propaganda.

In 1942, psychologists established the first “Rumor Clinic” at Harvard University to combat rumors during WWII.

In 1942, psychologists Gordon Allport and Robert Knapp established the first “Rumor Clinic” at Harvard University to combat these rumors. The clinic revolved around a column published every Sunday in the Boston Daily Herald, where Allport and his team countered rumors sent in by readers. The rumor was printed and then debunked with a fact from a local expert. Scientists would then analyze the rumor, exploring the social and psychological functions it served in order to help the public understand why rumors were so rampant in wartime. The clinic also had volunteer “rumor wardens,” who went out into the community to listen for rumors and report them back. These wardens could often be found in hair salons or cafes, where small talk was common. The members of the Rumor Clinic also gave speeches and distributed pamphlets that counteracted and analyzed common rumors.

The Rumor Clinic model became a popular one. Less than
a year after the Boston clinic was established, more than 50 additional clinics
had popped up from San Francisco to New York City. The clinics remained active
until wartime rumor began to dissipate in 1943.

Why
rumor, why now?

The current pandemic and the rumor mill of World War II suggest that rumor arises in times of crisis, but why? In discussing the coronavirus, psychologist Steven Taylor has pointed to the uncertainty and significance of the situation, combined with the lack of information. He notes that when we are dealing with a situation of such importance and we don’t have as much information as we would like, rumor serves as an outlet for our anxiety and a method of filling gaps in our knowledge.

When we are dealing with a situation of such importance and we don’t have as much information as we would like, rumor serves as an outlet for our anxiety and a method of filling gaps in our knowledge.

Taylor’s analysis appears to be drawn from work done by Allport, Knapp, and others in World War II. After analyzing 1,100 wartime rumors, Allport and Postman created the “basic rumor formula”: r = I × A, expressing the idea that rumor is a direct function of importance and ambiguity. When faced with highly important but highly ambiguous situations, rumor will be rampant.

Knapp explored the psychological function of rumor, noting that a crisis like war “focuses and intensifies the emotional life of the public” and that “rumors arise to express these feelings.” He identified three kinds of rumors and the psychological functions that they serve. The current rumor about the Chinese laboratory manufacturing the virus, for example, would classify as a wedge driver rumor, a type of rumor that expresses existing hostilities and allows us to find a scapegoat in times of great frustration. Knapp also pointed to pipe dream rumors (like the rumor of a vaccine), which help us to express our hopes and wishes. Finally, bogie rumors express our fears, as in the recent rumor that the U.S. military is implementing martial law. All of these types of rumors indeed spread misinformation, but they help us process and make sense of an uncertain situation.

When faced with highly important but highly ambiguous situations, rumor will be rampant.

Rumors may provide an outlet for our heightened emotional life during crisis, but they nonetheless have dire consequences. This is evidenced by the recent shortage of antimalarial drugs and the death of an Arizona man who ingested a form of chloroquine to protect himself from the virus. Today’s rumor control experts face a different and much more daunting task than their 1940s counterparts, negotiating information legitimacy in a period of history where social media and constantly updated news feeds almost guarantee that a pandemic will fuel the spread of false information. The World Health Organization recently lamented the onset of a “coronavirus infodemic,” characterized by the rampant spread of rumor, myth, and misinformation via social media as well as more traditional media outlets. Indeed, much has changed in our information and communication landscape since the 1940s, but it appears that most agencies continue to rely on the methods crafted seven decades ago: squashing rumors with facts.

The effectiveness of this method of directly countering rumors with facts was debated during the War and continues to be debated today. While some research suggests that the direct counteraction of rumor with fact is successful, other research indicates that the effects of this approach are minimal and short-lived. Some scholars warn of a backfire effect, where exposing people to false misinformation, even to debunk it, actually increases belief. Recent research has, however, begun to explore the nuances of this method. In a recent review of the literature, D.J. Flynn, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler describe several factors that appear to make corrections more successful: for example, the use of professional fact-checkers or the presentation of facts in graphical rather than textual form. Recent research also suggests that direct refutation of rumor may succeed if the refutation comes from an unlikely political source in polarized environments. For example, Adam Berinsky demonstrated that a Republican refuting rumors about Barack Obama’s health care reform was more successful than the same refutation coming from a Democrat or a neutral source.

Rumors may provide an outlet for our heightened emotional life during crisis, but they nonetheless have dire consequences.

In addition, we are only just beginning to understand how rumor operates online and in social media networks. The World Health Organization has partnered with many of these companies—Facebook, Twitter, and Google—to consider ways of using them to combat pandemic misinformation. Several of these sites are actively blocking and removing misinformation, as was the case with a video in which Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro downplayed the necessity of social distancing and promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment. Recent research suggests that social media networks can give rise to “rumor communities” that forcefully resist counterarguments. In these cases, understanding the group dynamics of rumor becomes as important as understanding the science of individual persuasion and belief.

It is clear that social and behavioral scientists have much to contribute to understanding the many variables at work in the spread of rumor. Perhaps, as we wade through this wave of misinformation, there is comfort in Robert Knapp’s optimism in 1994: “If we are to survive the rumor virus, we will have to learn fast … Can we control the ravages of rumor? I think we can if we try.”

The post Loose Lips: The Psychology of Rumor During Crisis appeared first on Behavioral Scientist.

"1 in 5" is one of the most high-profile and contested statistics in the media today. Referring to the number of women who experience sexual assault during their time in college, “1 in 5” is frequently invoked by activists to intensify public efforts to identify, prevent, and prosecute sexual assault. At the same time, it is roundly critiqued by those who feel it is an inflated, politically motivated number that creates mass hysteria rather than sound policy. A closer look at the origins of “1 in 5” can help us understand these polarized views and, more importantly, appreciate what is at stake in publicly acknowledging sexual assault and rape so that we can better support survivors.

While it may appear to be a 21st century meme, “1 in 5” actually has a 30-year history. Its origins lie in the work of feminist social scientists who were inspired by the 1970s anti-rape movement to try and accurately measure the prevalence of rape and sexual assault. I say “accurately” because there was wide acknowledgment (then, as now) that attempts to do so had been hampered by poorly designed surveys and pervasive underreporting. One of these scientists was Mary Koss.

In 1976, Koss, then a newly minted assistant psychology professor at Kent State University, became intrigued by the difficulty of gathering accurate statistics about rape and sexual assault. As she later recalled, “I had recently read journalist Susan Brownmiller’s book, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. Using what few data were available at the time, she carefully documented that the scope of rape was underestimated. The challenge of finding these unmeasured rapes pulled me in….”

To rise to this challenge, Koss used her expertise in survey design and measurement to develop a questionnaire, the Sexual Experiences Survey, that would be worded to pick up a wide range of sexual victimization experiences, including rape. In its first version, the survey included thirteen questions. Twelve of those asked about behavior but did not use the word “rape.” For example, one question, which constituted the legal definition of rape, was, “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with a man when you didn’t want to because he used some degree of physical force?” The 13th question was, “Have you ever been raped?”

The history of “1 in 5” challenges us to critically examine, in the present moment, who has the power to name rape and be believed, under what conditions, and with what consequences.

Koss administered this initial survey to over 3,800 students at Kent State. As expected, she found that rape was prevalent on campus. What was more startling, and what became—and has remained—controversial in ensuing debates, was that over half of her female respondents who endorsed the legal definition of rape did not simultaneously endorse the item in which their experiences were called “rape.” Importantly, participants were more likely to respond with this disconnect if the rape was perpetrated by an acquaintance as opposed to a stranger.

The last item on the survey, “Have you ever been raped?” had originally been intended only as a validity check. But its inclusion actually exposed the wide gap between experiencing certain acts and publicly naming them “rape,” especially if the experience was with someone known to the respondent. This finding was crucial in making date and acquaintance rape visible and helped explain why previous efforts to measure sexual assault suffered from underreporting.

Based on these results, Koss identified what she called the “hidden rape victim”—a woman who endorses experiencing the behavioral and legal definition of rape but who does not call it rape. Koss then refined her survey to include only the behavioral items (in other words, no questions that labeled experiences as “rape” or “assault”) and added a more nuanced 4-item “perception of victimization” scale. On this scale, respondents chose the statement that most closely matched their experience. These statements were: “I don’t feel I was victimized”; “I believe I was a victim of serious miscommunication”; “I believe I was a victim of a crime other than rape”; and, “I believe I was a victim of rape.”

Koss administered the revised survey to over 6,000 university students across 32 institutions in the United States. The result? Twenty-seven percent of women reported having experienced attempted or completed rape as the law defined it since the age of 14, the vast majority perpetrated by a date or acquaintance (the more commonly reported “1 in 5” refers only to sexual assault during time in college). Only 55 percent of respondents who reported a completed rape perpetrated by a stranger also endorsed the item “I believe I was a victim of rape.” And if the completed rape was perpetrated by an acquaintance, this went down to only 23 percent.

Instead of asking why women were so reluctant to report a rape, critics seized upon this finding to try to undermine the reality of date/acquaintance rape, the credibility of its victims, and the validity of the survey results. Koss’s finding that the majority of women felt victimized by their experience even if they stopped short of calling it rape went largely unnoticed. If women weren’t calling it rape, critics argued, why should anyone else?

In 1988, journalist Robin Warshaw wrote a book inspired by the survey results entitled I Never Called It Rape, which focused on raising awareness about the nature and prevalence of date and acquaintance rape, for which Koss wrote a prologue. Koss’ work garnered immediate and widespread attention. She soon found herself the target of attacks by conservative media and other academics.

At their most damning, critics charged Koss with literally conjuring up an experience that simply did not exist. One of these critics, self-dubbed “factual feminist” Christina Hoff Sommers, continues to argue that the “1 in 5” statistic is inflated and leads to exaggerated claims of rape victimization and thus ineffective policies (she has also named it one of five “feminist myths that will not die,” alongside the gender pay gap and stats about the sexual trafficking of girls). Despite this, Koss presented testimony at the hearings leading to the first Violence Against Women Act, in 1994, and continues to research what factors affect sexual assault and rape acknowledgement.

Half of their survey respondents who had experienced rape according to this legal definition did not acknowledge experiencing either sexual assault or rape.

So what can the origins of the “1 in 5” statistic tell us about how to move forward with sexual assault policy? The number itself has been remarkably stable. Survey after survey reveals that when female college students are asked if they have experienced oral, anal, or vaginal penetration in situations involving physical force, threat of force, coercion, or incapacitation, about 20 percent of respondents say “yes,” and about half of the victims of even the most violent crimes still don’t call it “rape.” In fact, in a recent study, Koss and her colleagues found that half of their survey respondents who had experienced rape according to this legal definition did not acknowledge experiencing either sexual assault or rape. This, more than any other finding, should be the one that gives us pause—but not for the reasons Hoff Sommers and others propose.

This finding suggests at least three things that can inform effective policy. First, most women are well aware—and research has amply documented—that publicly acknowledging sexual assault and rape will activate a cascade of aversive and, for some women, even life-threatening events. Despite legal reforms, increased public awareness, and the power of #MeToo to enhance survivor credibility, more policy work needs to be done to make it safe, worthwhile, and nonstigmatizing for women to publicly acknowledge their experiences.

Second, policy needs to reflect the finding that regardless of how a woman labels her experience, she will face negative emotional consequences and should have access to support. Research findings are mixed regarding the long-term mental health outcomes of labeling versus not labeling, but one thing is certain: regardless of whether she labels the rape as a rape, it is still experienced as problematic and distressing, and can have long-term repercussions.

Not acknowledging rape when it happens is not a sign that it didn’t happen or was unproblematic. It is a sign that we do not have adequate language for communicating the complexity of sexual violence and its aftermath.

Third—and here is where it gets complicated—we need to create forums where all kinds of women from all sectors of society can talk about sexual victimization in all of its complexity and be taken seriously as narrators of their own experiences, whatever terms they choose to use. Women who have survived a rape according to its legal definition, whether they call it a rape or not, suffer lasting effects. Not acknowledging rape when it happens is not a sign that it didn’t happen or was unproblematic. It is a sign that we do not have adequate language for communicating the complexity of sexual violence and its aftermath. It is a sign that women are still denied full agency in the construction of their sexual subjectivities. As feminist philosopher, activist, and survivor Linda Alcoff recently wrote in her book Rape and Resistance, “The point is for victims not simply to have the capacity to express our experiences and what we ‘are,’ as if this is fixed, but also to have a hand in making what we are, what we wish to be, and for this we need a voice both individually and collectively.”

It is now over 30 years since Koss first published her work on hidden rape victims. Instead of rehashing whether “1 in 5” is valid and whether women are reliable interpreters of their own experiences, we should be asking why it is so hard for us to hear these experiences and connect them to larger structures of power and domination. The history of “1 in 5” challenges us to critically examine, in the present moment, who has the power to name rape and be believed, under what conditions, and with what consequences.

As the #MeToo movement unfolds and we grapple with how to extend its reach to racialized, gender minority, immigrant, low socioeconomic status, and precariously employed women—all those who have historically been denied the power to name their own experiences or face violent consequences if they do—we should brainstorm policies that will make it possible and safe for more women to speak meaningfully and contextually about all forms of sexual victimization. Only then can we begin both to help individuals and to dismantle the systems that silence them.

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More than fifty years ago, then Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the famous—or infamous—experiments on destructive obedience that have come to be known as “Milgram’s shocking experiments” (pun usually intended). Milgram began his experiments in July 1961, the same month that the trial of Adolf Eichmann—the German bureaucrat responsible for transporting Jews to the extermination camps during the Holocaust—concluded in Jerusalem. The trial was made famous by the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s reports, later published in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt claimed that Eichmann was a colorless bureaucrat who blandly followed orders without much thought for the consequences, and whose obedient behavior demonstrated the “banality of evil.”

Milgram himself was Jewish, and his original question was whether nations other than Germany would differ in their degrees of conformity to authority. He assumed that the citizens of America, home of rugged individualism and apple pie, would display much lower levels of conformity when commanded by authorities to engage in behavior that might harm others. His Yale experiments were designed to set a national baseline.

Half of a century after Milgram probed the nature of destructive obedience to authority, we are faced with the unsettling question: What would citizens do today?

The Original Experiment

In Milgram’s original experiment, participants took part in what they thought was a “learning task.” This task was designed to investigate how punishment—in this case in the form of electric shocks—affected learning. Volunteers thought they were participating in pairs, but their partner was in fact a confederate of the experimenter. A draw to determine who would be the “teacher” and who would be the “learner” was rigged; the true volunteer always ended up as the teacher and the confederate as learner.

The pairs were moved into separate rooms, connected by a microphone. The teacher read aloud a series of word pairs, such as “red–hammer,” which the learner was instructed to memorize. The teacher then read the target word (red), and the learner was to select the original paired word from four alternatives (ocean, fan, hammer, glue).

Did Milgram’s experiment demonstrate that humans have a universal propensity to destructive obedience or that they are merely products of their cultural moment?

If the learner erred, the teacher was instructed to deliver an electric shock as punishment, increasing the shock by 15-volt increments with each successive error. Although the teacher could not see the learner in the adjacent room, he could hear his responses to the shocks as well as to the questions. According to a prearranged script, at 75 volts, the learner started to scream; from 150 volts to 330 volts, he protested with increasing intensity, complaining that his heart was bothering him; at 330 volts, he absolutely refused to go on. After that the teacher’s questions were met by silence. Whenever the teacher hesitated, the experimenter pressed the teacher to continue, insisting that the “the experiment requires that you continue” and reminding him that “although the shocks may be painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage.”

Milgram was horrified by the results of the experiment. In the “remote condition” version of the experiment described above, 65 percent of the subjects (26 out of 40) continued to inflict shocks right up to the 450-volt level, despite the learner’s screams, protests, and, at the 330-volt level, disturbing silence. Moreover, once participants had reached 450 volts, they obeyed the experimenter’s instruction to deliver 450-volt shocks when the subject continued to fail to respond.

Putting Milgram’s Work in Context

Milgram’s experiment became the subject of a host of moral and methodological critiques in the 1960s. These became somewhat moot with the publication of the American Psychological Association’s ethical principles of research with human subjects in 1973 and the restrictions on the use of human subjects included in the National Research Act of 1974, which effectively precluded psychologists from conducting experiments that, like Milgram’s, were likely to cause serious distress to subjects. This was undoubtedly a good thing for experimental subjects, but it also blocked attempts to answer a question that many were asking: Did Milgram’s experiment demonstrate that humans have a universal propensity to destructive obedience or that they are merely products of their cultural moment?

Cross-cultural studies at the time provided a partial answer. The U.S. mean obedience rate of 60.94 percent was not significantly different from the foreign mean obedience rate of 65.94 percent, although there was wide variation in the results (rates ranged from 31 to 91 percent in the U.S. and from 28 to 87.5 percent in foreign studies) and design of the studies. However, a historical question remained: Would subjects today still display the same levels of destructive obedience as the subjects of fifty years ago?

There are grounds to believe they would not. In the 1950s, psychologists and the general public were shocked by the results of Solomon Asch’s experiments on conformity. In a series of line-judgement studies, subjects were asked to decide which of three comparison lines matched a target line. Crucially, these judgements were made in a social context, among other participants. Only one of the subjects in the experiment was a naive subject, while the other six were confederates of the experimenter instructed to give incorrect answers. When they gave answers that were incorrect, and seemed plainly incorrect to the naive subjects, about one-third of the naive subjects gave answers that conformed with the majority. In other words, people were happy to ignore the evidence before their eyes in order to conform to the group consensus.

For some observers, these results threatened America’s image as the land of individualism and autonomy. Yet in the 1980s, replications of Asch’s experiment failed to detect even minimal levels of conformity, suggesting that Asch’s results were a child of 1950s, the age of “other-directed” people made famous by David Reisman in his 1950 work The Lonely Crowd. Might the same failure to replicate be true today if people faced Milgram’s experiment anew?

Understanding Milgram’s Work Today

Although full replications of Milgram’s experiment are precluded in the United States because of ethical and legal constraints on experimenters, there have been replications attempted in other countries, and attempts by U.S. experimenters to sidestep these constraints.

A replication conducted by Dariusz Dolinski and colleagues in 2015 generated levels of obedience higher than the original Milgram experiment, although the study may be criticized because it employed lower levels of shock.

More intriguing was the 2009 replication by Jerry Burger, who found an ingenious way of navigating the ethical concerns about Milgram’s original experiment. Burger noted that in the original experiment 79 percent of subjects who continued after the 150 volts—after the learner’s first screams—continued all the way to the end of the scale, at 450 volts. Assuming that the same would be true of subjects today, Burger determined how many were willing to deliver shocks beyond the 150-volt level, at which point the experiment was discontinued.

Given social support, most subjects refused to continue to administer shocks, suggesting that social solidarity serves as a kind of a defense against destructive obedience to authority.

About 70 percent were willing to continue the experiment at this point, suggesting that subjects remain just as compliant in the 21st century. Nonetheless, Burger’s study was based upon a questionable assumption, namely that 150-volt compliance has remained a reliable predictor of 450-volt compliance. Subjects today might be willing to go a bit beyond 150 volts, but perhaps not to the far end of the scale (after learners demand that the experiment be discontinued etc.). In fact, this assumption begs the critical question at issue.

However, French television came to the rescue. One game show replicated Milgram’s experiment, with the game show host as the authority and the “questioner” as the subject. In a study reported in the 2012 European Review of Applied Psychology, J.-L. Beauvois and colleagues replicated Milgram’s voice feedback condition, with identical props, instructions, and scripted learner responses and host prods. One might question whether a game show host has as much authority as a scientific experimenter, but whatever authority they had managed to elicit levels of obedience equivalent to Milgram’s original experiment (in fact somewhat higher, 81 percent as opposed to the original 65 percent). It would seem that at least French nationals are as compliant today as Milgram’s original subjects in the 1960s.

In fact, the replication suggests a darker picture. One of the optimistic findings of the original Milgram experiment was his condition 7, in which there were three teachers, two of whom (both confederates of the experimenter) defied the experimenter. Given this social support, most subjects refused to continue to administer shocks, suggesting that social solidarity serves as a kind of a defense against destructive obedience to authority. Unfortunately, this did not occur in the French replication, in which the production assistant protested about the immorality of the procedure with virtually no effect on levels of obedience. And unfortunately, not in the Burger study either: Burger found that the intervention of an accomplice who refused to continue had no effect on the levels of obedience. So it may be that we are in fact more compliant today than Milgram’s original subjects, unmoved by social support. A dark thought for our dark times.

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