The Science of Awe (via Sierra Club)

Who cares about the science of awe - it's interesting and it's fun to puzzle out these questions, but awe is best experienced, not studied.

Interestingly, it was only 2003 that Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jonathan Haidt, then at the University of Virginia, proposed awe as an emotion worth studying. “In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear,” they wrote in the journal Cognition and Emotion, “awe is felt about diverse events and objects, from waterfalls to childbirth to scenes of devastation. . . . Fleeting and rare, experiences of awe can change the course of a life in profound and permanent ways.”

This is an interesting article from The Sierra Club.

The Science of Awe

Can psychologists chart what happens when nature blows your mind?

By Jake AbrAhamson
November 6, 2014

Cedar Wright enjoy a view of the long way down, moments after getting the first ascent of the Virgin Tower in Enshi Grand Canyon National Park, China. | Photo by Keith Ladzinski

A FEW YEARS AGO, I RAN Utah’s Green River with a group of 13-year-olds. Our first day was a grueling, 26-mile slog through mostly flat water, with a few Class I and II rapids as our prize. I knew the real reward would come when we entered the most majestic part of Desolation Canyon in a couple of days, but they wouldn’t take my word for it. They were slouched in their boats asking, “Why are we doing this?”

That evening a thunderstorm rolled into the river valley, and we spent an hour in our tents. It was one of the most intense and otherworldly storms I’d ever seen. When thunder struck, it felt like my body was inside God’s clap, and the lightning galvanized the entire sky. Eventually the sky cleared. I stepped out of my tent as if exiting a bomb shelter, with a distinct feeling that the world would be different. The kids seemed to emerge from their tents at the exact same instant. The air was heavy and hot, the sky a color I had never imagined—gold from the land to the firmament. Time slowed. The mountains, the people, and the river flowing through it all seemed held together by an intelligent pattern.

The frustration of the day’s paddle was wiped away. I felt benevolent and open toward the kids. Making dinner was easy. The storm had pulled us together.

Looking back, I was puzzled by the experience. What had happened to me during that thunderstorm? I know humans don’t move in unison accidentally, so why did I think we’d emerged from our tents in perfect sync? I’m not a spiritual person, or a gushy one, so what caused this quasi-religious feeling that the mountains, people, and river were hanging together in ethereal balance?

I am both thrilled and dispirited to report that science has answered these questions.

Scientifically speaking, the storm brought me into a state of awe, an emotion that, psychologists are coming to understand, can have profoundly positive effects on people. It happens when people encounter a vast and unexpected stimulus, something that makes them feel small and forces them to revise their mental models of what’s possible in the world. In its wake, people act more generously and ethically, think more critically when encountering persuasive stimuli, like arguments or advertisements, and often feel a deeper connection to others and the world in general. Awe prompts people to redirect concern away from the self and toward everything else. And about three-quarters of the time, it’s elicited by nature.

In June 2014, the Sierra Club’s Inspiring Connections Outdoors program (formerly known as Inner City Outings) arranged to take 25 Oakland High School students on a two-day rafting trip down Northern California’s American River. They also took part in a study designed to quantify the biological and emotional benefits of such a trip. | Photos by Jayms Ramirez

IT WAS ONLY 11 YEARS AGO that psychologists Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jonathan Haidt, then at the University of Virginia, proposed awe as an emotion worth studying. “In the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear,” they wrote in the journal Cognition and Emotion in 2003, “awe is felt about diverse events and objects, from waterfalls to childbirth to scenes of devastation. . . . Fleeting and rare, experiences of awe can change the course of a life in profound and permanent ways.”

Over twenty studies later, the picture of awe is clearer and more detailed. “In various studies we’ve asked people, ‘What’s running through your mind when you feel awe?’” Keltner said, “and they’ll say things like ‘I want to make the world better,’ or ‘I just feel like being quiet,’ or ‘I feel like purifying things.’ It makes you humble. It makes you curious about the world.” To awe, Keltner attributes both the faith of Krishna, who, according to myth, on being shown the secrets of the universe through a third eye, was suddenly ready to do God’s work; and the desire of John Muir to protect the environment, which was brought about by his life-altering experiences in the Sierra. Throughout his writings, Muir described quintessential awe experiences. Take this moment, when he feels pleasurably energized by the massive and threatening Mt. Hood: “There stood Mount Hood in all the glory of the alpenglow, looming immensely high, beaming with intelligence, and so impressive that one was overawed as if suddenly brought before some superior being newly arrived from the sky.”

Not surprisingly, such experiences are tough to replicate in a laboratory setting. To elicit and study awe, Keltner and his peers instead rely on mind-bending videos, quick exposures to nature amid urbanized landscapes, or vast and disorienting stimuli. In an early study, participants were asked to stare at a replica of a T. rex skeleton. These techniques work. Psychologists can show certain awe-inducing videos to a test group and then ask questions about how cognition, other emotions, and self-concept are affected by the experience.

However, Keltner, a tan Californian with sandy, shoulder-length hair and a wholesome smile—who cites hiking in the High Sierra, meeting the Dalai Lama, and the births of his daughters as among the greatest awe events in his life—thinks scientists can gain a new perspective on the emotion if they move away from amazing-video, dinosaur-skeleton awe. To conduct what Keltner believes will be the first study to measure the long-term, physical health benefits of awe, he and a team of grad students are moving the laboratory into the woods.

“The science of emotion gets really exciting when you get as close to the phenomenon as possible,” Keltner told me. “We want to engage with people and observe them when they’re really out there on the river or lying under the stars.”


WHICH IS WHY I FIND MYSELF pulling into an eddy on California’s American River with a boatload of students from Oakland High School and their environmental science teacher and guide, Kevin Jordan. A hundred yards ahead, the water drops at a commotion of river and rocks called Troublemaker. It churns with whitewater and white noise. The kids wait calmly as Jordan wrangles the other boats before we make the plunge. This is just one of seven Sierra Club Inspiring Connections Outdoors trips during which Keltner’s awe study will take place.

One of the boats holds Craig Anderson, a trim, towering doctoral student who studies with Keltner. He wears a vintage Seattle Mariners cap with a GoPro camera mounted on top, which he uses to tape the kids’ interactions on the rafts before, during, and after rapids. “We can analyze people’s facial expressions muscle by muscle,” he told me earlier. “We can run the vocals through a program. Are people kidding around? Are they calm? Are they working as a team?”

Anderson and Keltner want to study the effect a two-day rafting trip will have on people’s lives, and they suspect that awe will play a major role in the story their data have to tell. Yesterday, the 25-odd students spat into vials and answered survey questions about how often they felt happy, sad, or stressed and how well they’ve been sleeping. They will spit into other vials when the trip ends and fill out similar surveys a month from now. The saliva samples will show how awe correlates with levels of stress hormones and the genes related to dopamine function.

About five miles upriver, the Chile Bar dam has closed its gates, and now what’s left of the river is literally flowing by beneath us. Jordan points to a black band on a boulder. “That rock’s already got three inches of wet. We’ll be carrying our rafts if we don’t ride this faucet.” He calls, “All forward,” and we charge toward Troublemaker.

For a few seconds, we lose ourselves. The drop sucks us into a vortex of froth. A wave plops over the starboard gunwale. And then we shoot out, bow slapping the surface, everyone gasping and soaked. A black granite fin rises up ahead. We fly around a bend into shade, and the water fades from emerald to black. Then it calms and deepens. The kids are all gasping, or smiling, or both. Jordan lets everyone in his boat jump into the water.

Jordan’s been taking his high school students on outings for over a decade. They’ve been to Hawaii and kayaked off Catalina Island, but the rivers of central California are his natural habitat. He wants to take the kids on a snow trip to see where the rivers begin, and “so they remember that there was snow in the Sierra Nevada.” I ask who of the floaters has seen snow, and half of them shoot up their hands.

Jordan stands, gets his balance, and peers downriver—a mariner in a crow’s nest. A kid bobs near the bow. The bands on the boulders are growing. “Get that road kill in the boat,” he says. “We gotta get down this river before the water runs out.”


“WHAT'S COOL ABOUT AWE is that it literally blows your mind,” Anderson says, referring to how its stimuli force people to revise their mental frames of reference. We are sitting on the bank watching night come over the canyon. Since we set up camp an hour ago, the beach has grown by 15 feet. The river is at “fish flows,” the minimum level for sustaining life.

“We might do some analyses by raft. We know emotions are contagious. If there was one really awe-prone person, did that make other people feel awe? You might have noticed that in the swimming sections, in one raft, everyone was in the water, and in another, nobody was in the water.”

For much of the night, Anderson can be found sitting on the beach, knees to chest, contemplative, eyes fixed river­ward. He grew up an Eagle Scout in New Mexico. As a young child, he loved watching Star Trek and pondering the show’s moral dilemmas, and he’s still taken by the unfathomable depths of the universe. “I’ve always been into space, thinking about how vast it is. Even now, the hairs are raising on my neck just talking about it.” (Piloerection is a telltale accompaniment to awe.) His favorite awe-eliciting videos are the opening to the movie Contact and a three-­minute clip that begins on Earth’s surface and gradually zooms out to one of the largest known stars in the universe, beside which our planet appears as a mere pixel. He says that he doesn’t often use segments from Planet Earth or other nature documentaries for research because viewers feel intense compassion for the animals, which muddies the results.

Before the light disappears completely, Anderson gets up to distribute paper and pens to the students, who are keeping journals as part of the study.

Today we experienced the little beauties of nature, one writes. I was able to be me and learn about the things around me.

My favorite rapid was Triple Threat. It was scary but fun at the same time, writes another.

The most amazing experience I had on this trip was meeting new people, learning new things about others, and experiencing the events with everyone. Meeting new people lets me see the different kinds of personality of each person and adds spice to life, journals a third student.

I ask Anderson if he thinks feeling awe in nature will make these kids care more about the river that’s trickling by through the dark.

“Generally speaking, yes. They say they feel more connected, not just to people but to the world around them. When you’re having your mind blown like this, people’s self-concerns really aren’t at the front of their minds. All your attention is directed outward, toward the thing that’s eliciting awe, on the outside environment, and on others around you. Also, they’re saying they’re appreciating the beauty of their surroundings, and if you’re appreciating the beauty of something, you want to take care of it. You don’t want to see it ruined.”

The next morning, we have to wait for the water. Jordan sits on a boat for hours, watching as birds putter about in the littoral zone. He sees eight species in the first 10 minutes. They pick bugs out of the mud. The dam’s daily releases determine this ecosystem’s rhythms.

Around 11:30, the river finally shows up, and Jordan calls the kids into a circle. “Let’s go, young scholars! The faucet is on!” His solemn reverence for the river is contagious. The sun peeks over the hills, bringing the temperature up by about 20 degrees.

“We’re going through a really important transition today,” Jordan says. He paces in place as he speaks, his head down as he gathers his thoughts, then he lifts his chin to project. “You’ll see that when we enter the reservoir, the biodiversity disappears. It’s like the reservoir in Oakland.”

For a while, we ride amid pale yellow, dried-out hills, with a few oak trees at the tops. “It takes a lot to live up there,” Jordan says to the kids in our boat. We pound through one rapid after another. Then he brings us into the gorge. The walls rise up and close in, and suddenly everything is greener, even the water, which intermittently bubbles and froths in emerald whirlpools. We spill into Satan’s Cesspool, bounce through Bouncing Rock. I recall a possible explanation that Keltner casually proposed for why, when people are asked to recall awe-inspiring experiences, they so often cite nature. It is Edward O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis: the idea that humans are instinctively fond of living systems and see life-giving power in vigorous water or dense greenery. At some evolutionary level, we think the river looks better at high flow, when the dam allows it through.

That afternoon we emerge into civilization. People are crouched on boulders, panning for gold. A family is sitting in the river on beach chairs. The water is up to their chests. It seems as if they’re waiting for the river to burst through the dam and carry them away.

We take out at a place called Salmon Falls. But there are no falls or salmon. Not anymore. The namesake hydraulics were inundated by the backup behind Folsom Dam in 1955, along with the salmon’s historic spawning route. Now they stop below the dam, where they’re corralled and turned into food. The ecosystem is all but post-natural: lifeless dirt and concrete detritus.

With his call of “young scholars,” Jordan gathers everyone into a circle for one last elegy. “Here we are at Salmon Falls. I’m glad it’s named that. We’re reminded of the salmon that used to migrate up this river into the Sierra Nevada. Now we’ve got a 100-foot dam and a 300-foot dam, and all the salmon are stuck down by Sac State, where we did the tour the other day.”

Jordan is saddened by the way the ecosystem has changed. He cares about the mergansers and red robins and the native weeds being run out by invasive weeds, the thoughtless fish swimming upriver by instinct. He would not be a good subject for an awe study. Too prone toward compassion. The T. rex skeleton would probably make him sad for the dinosaurs.

The kids each say a word to represent the hardest part of the trip and the best part of the trip. For the hardest, they say, pancakes, burning, backstroke, pans, sleeping, rocks, cuticles, revenge, current, flatwater. For the best: teamwork, carnage, stargazing, water, native, swimming, backpaddle, fun, community. Then Anderson distributes vials for the kids to spit in, and everyone returns to the city.

This article was funded by Sierra Club Outdoors.

Jake Abrahamson is Sierra's assistant editor.
See more stories by this author

E.O. Wilson On Humanity, Survival, and Nature - His New Book about Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique

From NPR's On Point with Tom Ashbrook, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning biologist and proponent of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson was this week's guest on the show. Wilson discusses his new book, A Window On Eternity: A Biologist’s Walk Through Gorongosa National Park. The images available of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique that are available in Google Images are stunning - this is certainly one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

This is the publisher's ad copy for the book:

A Window on Eternity is a stunning book of splendid prose and gorgeous photography about one of the biologically richest places in Africa and perhaps in the world. Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique was nearly destroyed in a brutal civil war, then was reborn and is now evolving back to its original state. Edward O. Wilson’s personal, luminous description of the wonders of Gorongosa is beautifully complemented by Piotr Naskrecki’s extraordinary photographs of the park’s exquisite natural beauty. A bonus DVD of Academy Award–winning director Jessica Yu’s documentary, The Guide, is also included with the book. 

Wilson takes readers to the summit of Mount Gorongosa, sacred to the local people and the park’s vital watershed. From the forests of the mountain he brings us to the deep gorges on the edge of the Rift Valley, previously unexplored by biologists, to search for new species and assess their ancient origins. He describes amazing animal encounters from huge colonies of agricultural termites to spe­cialized raider ants that feed on them to giant spi­ders, a battle between an eagle and a black mamba, “conversations” with traumatized elephants that survived the slaughter of the park’s large animals, and more. He pleads for Gorongosa—and other wild places—to be allowed to exist and evolve in its time­less way uninterrupted into the future. 

As he examines the near destruction and rebirth of Gorongosa, Wilson analyzes the balance of nature, which, he observes, teeters on a razor’s edge. Loss of even a single species can have serious ramifications throughout an ecosystem, and yet we are carelessly destroying complex biodiverse ecosystems with unknown consequences. The wildlands in which these ecosystems flourish gave birth to humanity, and it is this natural world, still evolving, that may outlast us and become our leg­acy, our window on eternity.

Great conversation with an always entertaining and thoughtful man. There is also an excerpt from the book and links to a few articles/excerpts published in other magazines (The Atlantic, Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal).

E.O. Wilson On Humanity, Survival, and Nature

Famed biologist E.O. Wilson says the way to save mankind is for the Age of Man to come to a close with a new respect for the rest of life. He joins us.

May 5, 2014
With guest host Jessica Yellin.



A giant spider in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. (Piotr Naskrecki)
Imagine wandering into a house overrun with fang-toothed spiders. Riding a helicopter deep into an unexplored gorge of granite and limestone to find new species. World-famous naturalist and biologist E.O. Wilson did all that — in his 80s. In one of Africa’s most biologically diverse nature preserves in Mozambique. And he says the wilfife there has powerful lessons for us humans. This hour, On Point, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning biologist E.O. Wilson on what he learned about mankind in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park.

Guests

E.O. Wilson, biologist, researcher and naturalist. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Author of many books, including the new A Window On Eternity: A Biologist’s Walk Through Gorongosa National Park.

From Tom’s Reading List

The Atlantic: E. O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything — “If one had to give E. O. Wilson a single label, evolutionary biologist would be as good as any. Sociobiologist, lifelong naturalist, prolific author, committed educator, and high-profile public intellectual might all also serve. But amidst his astonishing range and volume of intellectual output, Wilson’s reputation, and most of his big ideas, have been founded primarily on his study of ants, most famously his discoveries involving ant communication and the social organization of ant communities. ”

Christian Science Monitor: A Window on Eternity — “Wilson tells the story of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, which boasts one of the densest wildlife populations in Africa. During a civil war that lasted from 1978 to 1992, much of the park ecosystem was destroyed, and its future seemed bleak. Some animal populations within the park declined by 90 percent or more. But then a wealthy American entrepreneur, Gregory C. Carr, launched an audacious effort to bring the park back to life. Slowly, the park is returning to its original state.”

The Wall Street Journal: E.O. Wilson Tells It Like It Is — “Dr. Wilson has a boy’s enthusiasm, and he revels in discovering new species at Gorongosa. But as the power of science and technology grows exponentially, he worries that people are giving up on preserving nature. Many seem to have resigned themselves to the idea that ‘we’ve already overrun the world,’ he says.”

Read An Excerpt Of “A Window On Eternity” By E.O. Wilson

Excerpt from A Window on Eternity by E.O. Wilson.

This is the first podcast in a new series from PLOS ONE, Mind the Brain.

About Mind the Brain
Linking neuroscience research, psychological disorders, health and well-being. The Mind the Brainteam follows. Click for full bios.

Mind the Brain Podcast Episode 01 – The Neuroscience of Art, Beauty, and Aesthetics

By Ruchir Shah
Posted: May 16, 2013


Hello readers, my name is Ruchir Shah, and I am the newest contributor to the Mind the Brain blog. I am a neuroscientist by training, but have a passion for story telling as well. I will be contributing a regular neuroscience podcast series to this blog, and I want to thank my fellow Mind the Brain bloggers for the opportunity to present my work. I’m delighted to be joining this excellent group of scientists!

For my first podcast in this series, I talk to Bevil Conway, who is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Wellesley College. Bevil has studied visual art as well as the mechanisms of visual perception, and has an active interest in the intersection between those two disciplines.In this podcast, we discuss the nascent field of “Neuroaesthetics”, and whether neuroscience can actually help us understand our experiences of beauty and aesthetics.

The term “aesthetics” means different things to different people, and from a neuroscience perspective it can involve sensory perception, emotional processing, attention, decision-making, and reward. We discuss how philosophers and neuroscientists have attempted to define this concept, and what we currently do and do not know about the neural basis for experiencing beauty. We then dive into a neuroscientific analysis of artwork, and whether we can glean any universal principles of aesthetics from such an approach. Finally, we discuss some fascinating case studies of how specific brain diseases or lesions can actually enhance art production, and what this might mean for how we perceive and experience beauty.

You can listen to and download the podcast here.

I hope you enjoy, and if you’re interested in learning more, you can read more of Bevil’s work on neuroaesthetics here, here, and here.

This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty - The Partially Examined Life, #77

George Santayana (1863-1952) was the first and maybe still the foremost Hispanic-American philosopher (as a student he worked under William James at Harvard). His embrace of naturalism and rejection of idealism were the foundation for a spiritual philosophy not based in religion. Here is some brief info on his life from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Philosopher, poet, literary and cultural critic, George Santayana is a principal figure in Classical American Philosophy. His naturalism and emphasis on creative imagination were harbingers of important intellectual turns on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a naturalist before naturalism grew popular; he appreciated multiple perfections before multiculturalism became an issue; he thought of philosophy as literature before it became a theme in American and European scholarly circles; and he managed to naturalize Platonism, update Aristotle, fight off idealisms, and provide a striking and sensitive account of the spiritual life without being a religious believer. His Hispanic heritage, shaded by his sense of being an outsider in America, captures many qualities of American life missed by insiders, and presents views equal to Tocqueville in quality and importance. Beyond philosophy, only Emerson may match his literary production. As a public figure, he appeared on the front cover of Time (3 February 1936), and his autobiography (Persons and Places, 1944) and only novel (The Last Puritan, 1936) were the best-selling books in the United States as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. The novel was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Edmund Wilson ranked Persons and Places among the few first-rate autobiographies, comparing it favorably to Yeats's memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Remarkably, Santayana achieved this stature in American thought without being an American citizen. He proudly retained his Spanish citizenship throughout his life. Yet, as he readily admitted, it is as an American that his philosophical and literary corpuses are to be judged. 

On The Partially Examined Life podcast, they discuss one of his classic books: The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (paper) or The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory (Kindle, $0.00).

Episode 77: Santayana on the Appreciation of Beauty

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:47:42 — 98.7MB)

On George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty (1896)

What are we saying when we call something “beautiful?” Are we pointing out an objective quality that other people (anyone?) can ferret out, or just essentially saying “yay!” without any logic necessarily behind our exclamation? The poet and philosopher Santayana thought that while aesthetic appreciation is an immediate experience–we don’t “infer” the beauty of something by recognizing some natural qualities that it has–we can nonetheless analyze the experience after the fact to uncover a number of grounds on which we might appreciate something. He divides these into areas of matter (e.g. the pretty color or texture), form (the relations between perceived parts), and expression (what external to the work itself does it bring to mind?) and ends up being able to distinguish high art (form-centric) from more savage forms (centered on matter or expression) while distinguishing real appreciation (which can include any of the three elements) from mere pretension (when you don’t really have an immediate experience at all but merely recognize that you’re supposed to think that this is good).

The regular foursome talk through Santayana’s theory with regard to expressionist painting, rock ‘n roll, beautiful landscapes, abstract expressionism, and more. Read more about the topic and get the book.

End song: “Sense of Beauty” by Mark Lint with help from some PEL listeners. Read about it.

Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com/donate to help support our efforts. A recurring gift will gain you all the benefits of PEL Citizenship. Thanks!

Lux Aeterna: A Journey of Light, From Distant Galaxies to Small Drops of Water

Beautiful . . . from Open Culture.

Lux Aeterna: A Journey of Light, From Distant Galaxies to Small Drops of Water

January 17th, 2013


In years past, we’ve shared with you two animations by Cristóbal Vila — first Nature by Numbers, which captured the ways in which mathematical concepts (Fibonacci Sequence, Golden Number, etc.) reveal themselves in nature. And then Inspirations, a short film celebrating the mathematical art of M.C. Escher. Now Vila returns with Lux Aeterna, a 3D study of light. On his web site, Vila describes the essence of the film.

[It's] a look at light from several points of view. On one side it’s a powerful radiation emitted by the most distant stars in the universe, and also by our Sun; light floods everywhere in nature, from the largest things to the smallest, creating interesting and beautiful effects; humans always used light as a symbolic and spiritual element; and it’s an intriguing physical phenomenon deeply studied by science too.

Vila’s site also hosts a series of screenshots that take you into the making of the film. Down the line, the Spanish artist plans to record a series of video tutorials in Spanish fully demonstrating the creative process. If you follow him on Twitter or Facebook, he’ll let you know when they’re ready for viewing. Incidentally, you can catch Open Culture on Twitter andFacebook too. Hope to see you there.

Open Culture - Crater Lake Under the Stars

Beautiful - sometimes I miss Oregon.

Crater Lake Under the Stars

August 11th, 2011 

Ben Canales took a trip to Crater Lake to shoot the stars, sacrificing money and personal relationships along the way. But he’s not complaining. The results are just painfully pretty…

Crater Lake Under the Star -Reprocessed from Ben Canales on Vimeo.

Refuting Satoshi Kanazawa's "Objective Attractiveness" Analysis

If you follow any of the psychology blogs, you no doubt have read recently about Satoshi Kanazawa's supposed "Objective Attractiveness" analysis at his Psychology Today blog, The Scientific Fundamentalist, in which he claimed that African-American women are "objectively" less attractive.

The article has been removed from the Psychology Today site, but you can still read it here.

The response to his post has been nothing short of incendiary - in an earlier century he may well have been forced to leave the village and live alone in the wilderness.

At Scientific American, guest blogger Khadijah Britton dissects the original post with a little more distance than some of the early responses were able to employ.

The Data Are In Regarding Satoshi Kanazawa

By Khadijah Britton | May 23, 2011

A Hard Look at Last Week's "Objective Attractiveness" Analysis in Psychology Today

If what I say is wrong (because it is illogical or lacks credible scientific evidence), then it is my problem. If what I say offends you, it is your problem."—Satoshi Kanazawa

Satoshi Kanazawa has a problem.

It is hard to believe that it was merely a week ago today that I first encountered Satoshi Kanazawa; given all that I have read, thought and talked about him this week, it feels like a year. For those of you who haven't been following this saga online, or aren't regular readers of Psychology Today: last Sunday, Satoshi Kanazawa, PhD, Evolutionary Biologist and professor at London School of Economics posed (and purported to answer) an incendiary question on his Psychology Today blog: "Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?"

Though the post has been removed from the site, you can now see it here. In the post, Kanazawa promises his readers a scientific analysis of public data showing objective evidence of Black women's status as the least attractive group among all humans. In other words, he promises to wave a magic wand, say "Factor Analysis!" and make racist conclusions appear before your (bluest) eyes.

As it turns out, Kanazawa is a repeat offender, with years of roundly criticized and heartily debunked pseudoscience-based shock-jockery under his belt. Despite this, he is still posting on the blog of a reputable mainstream publication, still teaching at a respected university and still serving on the editorial board of one of his discipline's peer-reviewed research journals. Though, possibly not for long: this particular post's racist hypothesis offended many, unleashing serious righteous outrage across the internet: social media users raced to blog, tweet and even petition demanding that Psychology Today remove Kanazawa as a contributor to their Web site and magazine. Psychology Today removed the post late Sunday night, and Monday morning the largest student organization in London (representing 120,000 students) unanimously called for Kanazawa's dismissal.

Over the past week, a handful of Kanazawa's fellow bloggers at Psychology Today have posted insightful and at times scientifically-grounded critiques of his research question and methodology. Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman has even done an independent statistical analysis of the data set Kanazawa uses to "prove" his theory, beating me to publication by a couple of days but coming to the same conclusions I have derived from my own independent analysis.

Independent evaluation of an article's data analysis is a critical step in deconstructing scientific inquiry, and one the mainstream media rarely undertakes. As the founder of a science journalism nonprofit – and therefore an aspiring entrant into the mainstream media ranks – I am alarmed by this. Whether we agree with Kanazawa's assertion or are horrified by it, we cannot report on it without actually comparing his hypothesis to the evidence. Yet, as the London Guardian warned us back in 2005:

...[s]tatistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.

In his blog post, non-journalist Kaufman [and his co-author on the post, Jelte Wicherts, who also wrote up a much more complete, technical analysis of the dataset here] did a reporter's job, explaining why Kanazawa's statistical analysis was bunk, independently analyzing the Add Health data set (freely available here or here for anyone to analyze!) to find that Kanazawa's conclusion that Black women are the least attractive was incorrect, even if you buy into his idea that the Add Health data set was a reasonable sample from which to ground such an assessment. See Kanazawa's graph, which is magical thinking in the guise of factor analysis:

and Kaufman's graph, which makes sense:

Like Kaufman, I take great issue with Kanazawa's use of a study on adolescent health and behavior to explain human attractiveness or lack thereof. The Add Health Study begins tracking its study participants at the age of twelve, and Kaufman wisely limits his analysis to that including participants who could reasonably be considered adults.

I am disturbed by the fact that the Add Health study's adult researchers even answered the question of how attractive they rated these youth. I am even more deeply disturbed by the idea that we are to extrapolate a general theory of desirability from these adult interviewers' subjective assessment of the children's attractiveness. Kaufman's analysis may be correct, but having run the analysis as well, I feel even more strongly that this data set is a completely inappropriate basis for Kanazawa's analysis.

Brian Hughes, of The Science Bit, agrees. Hughes' critique focuses on the lack of race and sex data of the interviewers, as well as the ambiguity around the number of interviewers used – it is a worthwhile read. Hughes also points out that the Add Health data set fails to report the race of the interviewer, or any facts about the interviewer at all. For example, there is no data to analyze to help us determine if interviewers preferred interviewees of their same race.

As Robert Kurzban comments in his Psychology Today blog retort to Kanazawa, "Rhodes et al. (2005) argued that if people prefer faces that constitute an average of the faces that they experience, then, as they put it, faces 'should be more attractive when their component faces come from a familiar, own-race population.' They indeed showed some evidence for an 'own race' effect." Hence, in knowing the race of the interviewer and the interviewee, we might actually be able to learn whether this held true and add to the body of scholarly knowledge.

Kaufman and other bloggers also address Kanazawa's painful contortion of factor analysis, which I agree is laughable. He looks at three measurements of the same test taken at three different time points and creates a one-factor model, with the one factor being "objective attractiveness." This is, of course, founded on the principle that an attractiveness rating handed out by interviewers in a study on adolescent health and well-being is actually measuring something that we can agree is "objective attractiveness."

He then says that by merging these three measurements for each interviewee into one factor, he can use factor analysis to get at that "objective attractiveness" while minimizing any error. This is just plain false. Factor analysis cannot get rid of measurement error. If it could, we'd all be using it all the time, and we'd get rid of all measurement error, and scientific studies wouldn't need to be replicated.

What his factor analysis might be saying is that over time, individuals were rated relatively consistently by interviewers on what the study called attractiveness. Without knowing anything about the interviewers, we have no idea whether this is significant. The beauty – and danger – of factor analysis is that the statistician running the analysis gets to define the factors, and there are an infinite number of factor solutions to any given problem - or at least, no unique solutions.

Kanazawa continues by looking at the attractiveness mean values for women by racial group, also as measured by the interviewer, and, seeing a difference in the overall attractiveness rating as broken down by these arbitrary racial groups (which somehow fail to include "Hispanic," despite all other study data including that category), concludes that since there are differences between groups, then the reason for that difference in the rating of attractiveness by interviewers over time is due to race.

But that is a logical fallacy. We have no idea why the interviewers felt differently about different youth in the study – correlation is not causation. In fact, according to Kaufman's reading of the data, correlation might not even really be correlation:

The low convergence of ratings finding suggests that in this very large and representative dataset, beauty is mostly in the eye of the beholder. What we are looking at here are simple ratings of attractiveness by interviewers whose tastes differ rather strongly. For instance, one interviewer (no. 153) rated 32 women as looking "about average," while another interviewer (no. 237) found almost all 18 women he rated to be "unattractive."

Kanazawa also correlates Black female self-perception of attractiveness as being higher than Black female rated attractiveness, despite there being no one-to-one relationship between self-identification of race and perceived race. The two could be completely different: for example, I could self-identify as Hispanic but my interviewer, seeing my dark skin, might perceive me as Black. Hence, Kanazawa's conclusions are nonsensical.

Kanazawa surmises that Black women's lower attractiveness might be due to low estrogen and high testosterone. Yet, high estrogen levels and low testosterone is a leading cause of fibroids, which significantly impact Black women, especially Black women who are overweight. Also, Black women have been found to have higher levels of estrogen in a study on breast cancer. Finally, Kanazawa offended his fellow Psychology Today bloggers in 2008 with his post, "The power of female choice: Fat chicks get laid more." The thesis there contradicts his supporting theory here. It leads me to wonder if this is all just some grand practical joke.

I see a more central flaw with Kanazawa's method beyond its creepiness, reliance on unscientific conjecture or abuse of factor analysis. Since the interviewers' assessment data was never intended to be used for an analysis such as Kanazawa's, the survey was not designed to capture that information. In fact, nowhere in the study monograph, nowhere on the website and nowhere in the study design materials is the interviewer's assessment of the interviewee's attractiveness mentioned. (I emailed the study designers to ask why they collected this information in the first place, and will update this post below if they answer.)

Why was the study undertaken? According to the study website, it was in response to a mandate by the US Congress inthe NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, where Congress asked a division of the NIH to "provide information about the health and well-being of adolescents in our country and about the behaviors that promote adolescent health or that put health at risk" with "a focus on how communities influenced the health of adolescents."

The Add Health study measures hundreds of variables. One has to wonder: why pick only race? Especially when the results of your "study" are so unabashedly weak? Seeing that Kanazawa based his findings on such a tenuously related study, I wonder how many other studies he scoured for evidence to support his point. This sort of "fishing" for results to support your finding leads to bad science, period.

I agree with Psychology Today blogger, Sam Sommers, PhD, of Tufts University, when he concludes:

Like it or not, the burden is higher when you're a scientist blogging about science. And anyone who can only think of one explanation for an observed difference in a data set might simply be incapable of meeting that high burden.

To quote Kanazawa, a little bit of logic goes a long way. Seeing that his work is rife with logical errors, Kanazawa should be criticizing himself.

I drafted this post after spending a couple of days sorting through my emotions on Kanazawa's work. Seeing that the man clearly relishes his role as an agent provocateur, I knew I could not impact him or those who respond to his work from a place of emotion. He has made that much clear.

From my incessant reading of blog responses and comments, I have encountered the sentiment that because Kanazawa's question was immoral to ask, his results are invalid. I agree with my heart and soul that the way he framed his so-called "research question" is offensive, racist and harmful. As I tweeted after reading Kanazawa's post, "Imagine a little Black girl reading this filth. [Toni Morrison's novel] The Bluest Eye is not history to her. It's reality." I want to protect that little girl – and wish I could heal all the little girls that came before her and grew up into beautiful women like this one, made to feel ugly by a racist society. I stand in solidarity with Black women and hope you will heed this blog's cry to stand stronger than ever in self-love.

The intent behind a question can establish an immoral line of inquiry and instigate immoral research methods (see the Nazi doctors' experiments). But a question itself is not evil. Scandalous, offensive and sometimes frightening questions are often at the root of important scientific inquiry. When supported by data significant enough to support them, these questions drive us toward the truth (see, e.g., "the Earth is round").

I agree with Psychology Today blogger Mikhail Lyubansky, PhD, when he says, "[e]xtraordinary claims ... require extraordinary evidence and editorial oversight." This does not lead us to censorship; it means requiring that an inquiry bring us closer to – not farther from – the truth. Kanazawa does not earn censure with the political incorrectness of his question, but earns social and scientific irrelevance through the weakness of his research. This irrelevance earns Kanazawa a special place in hell in today's link-driven media economy – one where no one will hear him scream. One week later, neither Kanazawa nor Psychology Today's editors has published any official defense, apology or explanation. The silence is deafening.

About the Author: Khadijah M. Britton, JD, is founder of BetterBio, a Massachusetts-registered nonprofit and fiscally sponsored project of the 501(c)(3) Fractured Atlas whose mission is to empower journalism that reinforces the intimate connection between life and science. BetterBio provides a platform for comprehensive science reporting, challenging us to ask hard questions and debunk dangerous myths while addressing our collective social responsibility. Khadijah also serves as a post-graduate research fellow in antibiotic policy under Professor Kevin Outterson at Boston University School of Law while she completes her Master's in Public Health at Boston University School of Public Health and studies for the bar exam.

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Tags: Science, objectivity, race, beauty, Psychology, Scientific American, Khadijah Britton, The Data Are In Regarding Satoshi Kanazawa, Psychology Today, evolutionary biology, Objective Attractiveness, Analysis, Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?, The Add Health Study, racism

University of Arizona Campus Health Service Presents: "Love Your Body Day"

Hmmm . . . . a former Miss America talking about loving your body. Well, that's one way to draw a crowd. She looked pretty skinny here when she won the title in 2008, which is not my idea of a healthy body. Maybe she will talk about the destructive nature of beauty pageants on female body image?

One of the sponsors is Sierra Tucson, an in-patient treatment facility that works with eating disorders, among many other things.

The University of Arizona Campus Health Service Presents: "Love Your Body Day"

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 22

6 PM

Student Rec Center, 1400 E 6th Street

Kirsten Haglund

Miss America 2008

"FREEDOM FROM PERFECTION:Overcoming Body Wars, Diet Culture, and Taking Back our Souls"

Q & A to follow talk

Sponsors include:

Campus Health Service, Campus Rec, Remuda Ranch

Rosewood Centers for Eating Disorders and

Sierra Tucson Treatment Center

For More information: welter@email.arizona.edu

Tags: University of Arizona, Campus Health Service, Love Your Body Day, Kirsten Haglund, Miss America 2008, Freedom from Perfection, Overcoming Body Wars, Diet Culture, Taking Back our Souls, culture, beauty, body image, eating disorders, health

Gregory S. Cootsona - The Telos of Beauty: A Common Quest for Theologians and Scientists

Gregory S. Cootsona's "The Telos of Beauty: A Common Quest for Theologians and Scientists," in the new issue of The Global Spiral, is a great essay on the nature of beauty from both a subjective and objective perspective. The article examines beauty "as the central purpose of the universe."

The Telos of Beauty: A Common Quest for Theologians and Scientists

By Gregory S. Cootsona

The twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, offered this provocative statement in his mature philosophical work, Adventures in Ideas:

The teleology of the Universe is directed toward the production of Beauty.¹

This sentence from Whitehead points toward a rich and stimulating conception of beauty—not as mere ornamentation (ultimately as cosmetics), which one can place at the periphery or which possesses merely commercial important—but astonishingly as the central purpose of the universe. With this provocative assertion, Whitehead points toward the purposive or teleological element of beauty—what I will call the telos of beauty. As Whitehead is wont to do, he extends his claim as far as possible: beauty structures and directs the final aim of the universe. Or more simply, beauty directs the universe. Whitehead makes an assertion that combines beauty in science with art and metaphysics, which is not a far distance from theology.

Whitehead’s citation provides an intellectual springboard for a new place of beauty in the dialogue between science and theology, namely, as a nexus for common understanding. And so, after some clarifying definitions and a word about my personal motivations, I begin this essay by unfolding a theological understanding of beauty. I develop the concept of divine glory by building on key biblical texts and two major thinkers in the Reformed tradition, the eighteenth century American theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, and the twentieth century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth.

This choice immediately raises a question: Why select the Reformed tradition when Catholic theologians have pursued the concept of beauty with greater intensity? Why chose Edwards when any theology of beauty evokes the name of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, undoubtedly the greatest exponent of a theological aesthetics in the past two hundred years? And secondly, why Barth, who expressed a long-standing antipathy to “natural theology,” a category into which he would seem to place the concept of beauty as common vocabulary for the science-theology dialogue? As a theologian in the Reformed tradition, I would like to rehabilitate Reformed reflection on the topic on beauty. And there are profound and substantial insights in this tradition. Edwards in particular has been forgotten. For example, I have found no mention of him in von Balthasar’s massive multivolume study, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. And yet there are at least two qualities of Edwards that are relevant to this study: first of all, Edwards self-consciously fashioned his work in the wake of Newtonian physics and thus engaged in an ongoing dialogue with scientific insight. Secondly, his ideas themselves were beautiful, enough so that he has been called “one of America’s five or six major artists, who happened to work with ideas instead of with poems or novels.”² In other words, Edwards sought the beauty of thought both materially and stylistically. As for Barth, though this theologian of revelation was not particularly interested in the insights of science, his theological reflections on beauty and particularly its relation to divine glory are potent and provide remarkable theological groundwork for finding intersections between scientific and theological concepts of beauty.

In the third section, I will connect these theologians’ concepts of God’s glory and therefore beauty with how scientists have described the beauty of their discipline, particularly drawing on Henri Poincaré, Werner Heisenberg, and Alfred North Whitehead. I will exegete these comments and reflections on beauty from twentieth-century scientists, seeking to their understandings of beauty. I will then offer some reflections and a synthesis of these insights. This procedure leads to my final section, in which I will pose questions and present directions for a future research program on beauty as a nexus for the science-theology dialogue.

Some Preliminary Clarifications

We do not want merely to see beauty… We want something else that can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.
—C.S. Lewis

Before proceeding, I offer an initial caveat: it may appear that I have begun with a conception of beauty, which I then sought to apply to science and theology (and by extension, art). My procedure is actually the reverse and therefore more modest. I have researched the way scientists and theologians (especially in the Reformed tradition) describe beauty as rightly perceiving, and theorizing about, their objects of study and as a goal in their lives and work. I have then sought to connect these leading concepts with one another. Science and theology possess a significant overlap in their definitions of beauty. The fact that this paper proceeds in reverse is simply the desire for clarity. It is easier to begin with the general concept of beauty and then sound it out in specific locations.

I submit a few preliminary clarifications. In my definition, beauty is the grasp of rightness. It arises for both theologians and scientists through rightly perceiving and theorizing about their objects of study. It is thus a perception of truth. Beauty also provides a lure for study. In this sense, it is telic. For theologians, it can be grasping God’s true nature, God’s creation, and our ethical life. For scientists, it is the rightly perceiving, and theorizing about, nature. When this perception is made, it is accompanied by a sense of completeness.

One of the corroborating features of defining the telic aspects of beauty is historical continuity. There is a correspondence with elements of the Augustine’s triad of unity, order, and proportion, as well as the related definition of Thomas: integrity, consonance, and clarity (integritas, harmonia, claritas). With Thomas, consonance stands out most clearly in connecting with a right perception of God and nature. It is also close to integrity—that things fit together. Nevertheless, I do not present my definition as exhaustive. Instead it is the locus of significant overlap between science and theology. There are certainly other aspects to beauty in Thomas’ and Augustine’s definitions, let alone subsequent formulations. Secondly, beauty offers telos in that beauty is motivation, fulfillment, and direction. Beauty offers direction by luring theologians and scientists in their work. Theologians might even point to a glimpse of eschatological wholeness. Something beautiful points to the One who is Beauty. This teleological element of beauty is a component of the well-known insight that beauty pleases us. Though this pleasure has often been focused on the eyes, I submit that we receive beauty through a variety of faculties, and perhaps most importantly for this paper, intellectually, or through the “eyes of the mind.’ The examples below from scientists and theologians will sufficiently exemplify this point.

To set this definition in the context of theology (which is my specialization), beauty represents a component of the doctrine of creation. It is a part of the way that a creative, beautiful God has left a footprint in the creation. Beauty thus expresses itself in these forms: God and the world understood rightly (the domain of theology and metaphysics) and therefore life lived rightly (the related discipline of ethics). It is also when human beings understand nature understood rightly (science).

I realize that my definition of beauty—a beauty that can be grasped in science and theology—runs in the face of the common, narrow fixation on beauty as the physical perfection of women’s bodies, a fact that can be discovered by a simple Google or Amazon search. In this latter case, beauty equals cosmetics or sexual appeal. Though beauty certainly includes attractive women and men, this is an entirely restrictive view of the entirety of beauty’s scope. One does not want to subsume all beauty ultimately under sexual attraction and thus under fertility and survival (which is the general vector of neo-Darwinian thinking). Neither, however, can beauty be defined in a way that omits sexuality. Beauty as telos, I submit—but cannot unfold here—provides a resolution.

This project of unfolding the telos of beauty as a common quest for theology and science brings together for me a fifteen-year period of research into the dialogue of these two disciplines. Stated simply, I have observed that both science and theology recur with descriptions of beauty. I then join this observation with my earlier degree in comparative literature, where aesthetics plays a critical role.³ If theologians have largely forgotten how to talk about beauty, scientists in the past century or so do more frequently, but maybe less willingly. The study of literature then educated me with sensitivity to the aesthetic aspects of human life, whether that human be a scientist or theologian. And ultimately, I believe that we are all humans first and thus share a drive toward beauty—or perhaps better stated, beauty lures us all and motivates us in whatever discipline we find ourselves.

In this project, I am also seeking to undercut the emphasis that arose in the Enlightenment via Immanuel Kant and David Hume —and I believe the concept of the telos of beauty can do this—that beauty is purely subjective and that it therefore does not lead the perceiver to the “thing in itself” (das Ding en sich). Hume’s lapidary formulation is certainly worth citing: “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”⁴ Kant’s resistance to the knower’s inability to penetrate to the reality of a thing “in itself” certainly includes human beings finding beauty. On the other hand, theological and scientific descriptions highlight that beauty can be discovered (and here I am leaning on the more literal meaning of “uncovered.”)

I propose that the discovery of the telos of beauty means that beauty has cultural variations to be sure, but there are also objective components in beauty that inhere in the object. In some way—but certainly with regional variations—theology and science (and art) seek truth of expression, whether it’s God’s, the world’s, or other forms. My definition of beauty therefore relates to both ontology and epistemology. Beauty exists outside of the knower. As well, it can be understood by the human mind. (Both of these assertions are important.) Accordingly, I am committed to a critical realism, in which reality exists outside of the mind of the knower and yet the interests and limitations of the knower interact with what is known. I take this position to be the current consensus in the dialogue of theology and science, and since not every related issue can be pursued here,⁵ I will proceed accordingly without further elaboration.

Read the whole article.

Tags: Gregory S. Cootsona, The Telos of Beauty, A Common Quest, Theologians, Scientists, Religion, Science, beauty, theology, Alfred North Whitehead, purposive, teleological, Werner Heisenberg, art