Why We Shift Blame

Why is it so easy to blame others when things go wrong in our life, when we ourselves are part of the cause? Why can others see in our motivations and behavior what we do not?

Robert Trivers, a Harvard professor and one of the founders of sociobiology, asserts that blame shifting is innate, arising from the evolutionary advantage of making it easier to fool others if we can first fool ourselves. The case is argued in his latest book, "The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-deception in Human Life." The thesis is that if we can deceive ourselves, then we can more convincingly deceive others, for they are more likely to conclude that we are firm in our convictions and assertions and thus less likely to be lying.

So where is the advantage in lying and deceiving others? It lies in the ability to more effectively hide our flaws and manipulate others. Life, in this view, is one continuous "Survivor Island" where one succeeds only to the extent that others can be fooled.

Trivers himself had plenty of years to think about blame and self-deception. Introspection became inevitable in his 68 years of trying to cope with bipolar disorder, multiple mental breakdowns requiring hospitalization, and social conflicts (including jail time).

I don't know where he got the idea to link self-deception with evolution, but no doubt it came from his early career exposure to pioneering evolutionists such as  E. O. Wilson and Ernst Mayer, who was in fact his Harvard mentor. Apparently also influential were the ideas expressed in "The Selfish Gene," by Richard Dawkins. Not only did our genes evolve to benefit the individual, but the selection pressure also favored genes controlling and protecting self image and sense of individual worth. Therefore, biologically speaking, our brains are biased to blame others rather than ourself.

Obviously, self-deception is counter-productive. It prevents us from correcting and preventing the real causes of our difficulties. This then is the conundrum. By fooling ourselves we do indeed make it easier to fool others, while at the same time paying the price of not solving our real problems.

So why is deception so prevalent? First, self-deception gives the illusion of protecting the sense of self and its hypersensitive ego. Secondly, if you are a skilled liar, fooling others probably works more often than it fails. It is still a Faustian bargain with our inner devil and a stupid way to live.

Sources:

1.  Kupferschmidt, K. 2011. Sharp Insights and a Sharp Tongue. Science. 334: 589-591.

2.  Trivers, R. (2011). The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceipt and Self-deception in Human Life. New York: Basic Books.

Save us from the Establishment Education Experts

The New Framework for K-12 Science Education. What They Missed.

The National Research Council of the National Academies recently released their landmark epistle, A Framework for K-12 Science Education. This book advocates the practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas that students should know at each K-12 grade level. The purpose is to influence the science education standards that are developed by each state.

While I applaud the purpose, I find much to criticize about these recommendations from this august body of experts. I won’t burden you with the details on everything I find lacking, but one whole category of recommendations seems to have been overlooked. Their guidelines say almost nothing about brain and behavior. Students are humans, and the most distinctive and important feature of being human is the brain and the behavior it controls. Why don't we require students to understand more about their brain and behavior, particularly as to the relationships to social interactions, emotions, and learning and memory? This is the one category of human experience where children especially need guidance and education. And in this category something that is especially applicable to school children is the science about learning and memory. We tell school children WHAT to learn (much of which is irrelevant to their life at the moment), but not HOW to learn. That is really bizarre. U.S. education needs to be rescued from the clutches of the establishment “experts.”

Bill Klemm

http://thankyoubrain.com

Author of e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort

What's to blame for Congressional gridlock

Of course, the liberal/conservative split is a main cause of gridlock. But it is not the sole, or perhaps even the main, reason for Congressional gridlock. There are many things most politicians agree on. Why don’t they just pass limited bills they easily agree on instead of over-ambitious, futile attempts at several-thousand page bills that nobody reads or understands and require bureaucrats to write thousands of more pages of implementing policy and regulation?

When members of Congress do manage to force thorough an omnibus bill, like ObamaCare, serious unintended consequences are inevitable.  Congress should stop believing it has the wisdom of Solomon to develop wise omnibus bills.

Some really obvious things that should be able to pass with relative ease include:

1. Expediting legal resident status for foreign PhD scientists and engineers who train this country. No, we ship them back to competing nations while we wait for everybody to agree on a comprehensive immigration reform Act that may not occur in our lifetime.
2. Sealing the borders instead of suing the several states who try to enforce illegal immigration laws. No, again we wait on the omnibus immigration Act.
3. Eliminating federal subsidies and tax breaks for corporations. No, we wait instead for the elusive omnibus bill to over-haul every aspect of federal taxation.
4. Lower the corporate tax rate to the international standard so our companies can compete on a level playing field. No, we again wait to do everything in one bill.
5. Make the spending cuts that both liberals and conservatives can agree on. No, we have to wait on comprehensive budget reform.

Then, there are some things that obviously need change where Congress in inexplicably unable to act:

1. Do something real about “too big to fail” instead of pretending that the Dodd-Frank bill has solved the problem.
2. Abolish government by “Czars.” This is Obama’s idea to circumvent Congress and why Democrats let him do that is a mystery. Failure of Congress to act further empowers the President, at the expense of Congress.
3. Limit the power of the Federal Reserve and make its processes more transparent.

Congress is impotent, and when it does act, often incompetent because its reach exceeds its grasp. They deserve Obama’s scorn as a “do nothing Congress.” Democrats who support gridlock are trying to help Obama’s re-election campaign. But they pursue this political tactic at the risk of their own jobs.

Whatever happened to that old notion that “half a loaf is better than none?”

Who to blame for poor schools

Congress is now going through the ritual of tweaking the No Child Left Behind law for the nation’s schools. The law is vigorously opposed by both teacher unions and the TEA party. That should tell you all you need to know about this bad legislation. Of course the reasons for opposition are quite different, but all have a large degree of validity. Teachers don’t like bureaucrats judging them and their schools, and the TEA party thinks we have too much federal government intrusion in general.

The law, however tweaked by revision, is fatally flawed by its basic assumptions about what is to blame for poor educational achievement in this country. Foremost is the fantasy that government should provide not only equal opportunity but equal outcome. The only way you can get all students to have equal learning is to dumb down the curricula, which is what is done. Schools cater to the lower performing students at the expense of good students. For example, over the last two decades an analysis by the Wall Street Journal revealed that the lowest-performing students have shown clear gains in test scores but little improvement for other students.

A second flaw is that the law ignores the extraordinary range of mental development in children. Some students cannot be salvaged at a given grade level. Moreover, student motivation for learning is a highly mutable, often changing from year to year. Some students cannot be salvaged at any stage, either for reasons of neglect, abuse, bad parenting, or the students’ own negative attitudes. “Do-gooder” focus on these students drags down the whole educational enterprise.

Then there is the problem of misplaced incentives. Where are the incentives for students to do better? In fact, the students are being asked to help make their school and teachers look good.

Finally, this era of No Child Left Behind and high-stakes testing fails to help us understand how to accomplish the basic purpose of assessment: figuring out what students know and need to learn. Multiple-choice tests are certainly not reliable. In fact, these tests mostly measure recognition memory, the least reliable indicator of what has been remembered.

One teacher, Ryan Kinser, endorses the idea of “teaching to the test,” but we need better tests: ones based on “curriculum-embedded performance assessments that are valid, reliable, and accurate measures of what and how students learned.” I would add that testing per se is not the problem. Indeed, research shows that tests reinforce retention of what has been learned. At a local school level, low-stakes benchmark tests should be routine and frequent.

Teachers do need to be held accountable and must share some of the blame. But not for the weaknesses of the culture of their community, or for bad school administrators and policies, or for the poor educations they get in Colleges of Education, or for the flawed requirements of No Child Left Behind.  Teachers have no control over many of the bad things schools do. The school year is too short, summer vacation is too long, more short holidays are needed, the school day needs to be restructured, most textbooks are just terrible, subjects are taught along academic themes rather than the integrated real world students live in, and the school environment in general just kills the joy of learning.

What should the role of the federal government be in education? It should be in administering meaningful educational research, providing guidance (not mandates) on academic standards, and disseminating “best practices.” No more, no less.

If all parties (government, principals, teachers, parents, and students) would accept their share of the blame, maybe we could make big improvements in education. As it is, everybody points the finger at somebody else.