THINKER'S ALMANAC - April 2

What classic fairy tale reminds us of the human tendency toward opting for harmony and conformity rather than telling the truth?

Subject:  Groupthink - “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

Event:  Birthday of Hans Christian Anderson, 1805

“The Little Match Girl,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Thumbelina”:  these stories are so familiar and so frequently adapted that many people fail to realize that they even have an author; many would probably be even more surprised to learn that they all have the same author:  Hans Christian Anderson, who was born on this day in Denmark in 1805. Anderson's name is so synonymous with fairy tales that his birthday is annually recognized as International Children’s Book Day.

                                                                Image by Lothar Dieterich from Pixabay 

Anderson was born into poverty;  his mother was a washerwoman and his father was a cobbler.  He left home at age fourteen, hoping to work in theater, but he soon discovered that his talent for poetry and storytelling was his ticket to success. 

Of his over 150 fairy tales, one stands out for its psychological and sociological insights:  “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a tale that has been translated into over 100 languages. 

The story is about an Emperor who is hoodwinked by two hucksters posing as weavers.  They tell the Emperor that they can weave him a beautiful new suit of clothes, but that the clothes are invisible to anyone who is stupid, incompetent, or unfit.  When the “sewing” is finished, the Emperor holds a procession to show off his new clothes.  None of the adults dares to admit that the Emperor is parading naked in public for fear of being labeled stupid or unfit.  There is one child in the crowd, however, who is not afraid to proclaim the truth; he cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”

More than a hundred years after Anderson wrote “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a research psychologist gave the story's main theme a name:  groupthink.

Irving Janis, from Yale, researched group decision-making rather than fairy tales, but he discovered the same psychological phenomenon found in Anderson’s story.  Groupthink occurs when adult groups opt for harmony or conformity over telling the truth.  This often leads to irrational and poor decision-making.

One specific historical case study analyzed by Janis was the poor group decision-making and thinking in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.  The plan, put together by John F. Kennedy’s administration, was to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro.  Even though President Kennedy involved some of the brightest people in the world in his planning process, the invasion of Cuba failed miserably.  This puzzled the president, but once he began to examine what happened, he realized his error.  Instead of encouraging his subordinates to scrutinize and question the invasion plan, he had allowed his men to simply go along with the plan, telling him what they thought he wanted to hear.  The lesson learned from the Bay of Pigs debacle was that to avoid groupthink the individuals in a group need to feel free to speak their minds.  They also should be encouraged to scrutinize the weaknesses of a plan as well as its strengths. When we work in groups, we are often too quick to try to maintain harmony and to establish consensus.  Kennedy was able to capitalize on the lessons learned in 1961 when the Soviet Union secretly deployed nuclear missiles to Cuba in October 1962.  After discovering the missiles, Kennedy made sure that he heard multiple points of view and that everyone involved was encouraged to debate, to argue, and to disagree.  This time, instead of failure, Kennedy achieved success.  The Soviets agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba, and nuclear conflict was averted (1).

Recall, Recite, Retrieve, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  How does the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” reveal Groupthink?  How did the lessons learned from the failure of the Bay of Pigs help Kennedy overcome Groupthink?

Challenge - Philosophy For Kids:  What is another story that you know from your childhood that contains the same kind of philosophical or psychological insights found in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?  Summarize the story and its insights.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

-April 2, 1951:  On this day, Jack Kerouac began a 21-day writing marathon, producing a 120-foot typewritten scroll that would become his best-known work, On The Road.  In a letter to his friend, Neal Cassady, Kerouac described the process and product:   “Went fast because the road is fast… wrote whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long (tracing paper that belonged to Cannastra.)–just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no paragraphs… rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road.”  The scroll contained 125,000 words, which means that Kerouac averaged approximately 6,000 words per day. On The Road was officially published in 1957.  The original scroll was purchased for $2.43 million by Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, in 2002.

Sources:

1-Williams, Kelly. “Groupthink and the Emperor’s New Clothes.” Medium.com 8 August 2017.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - April 1

Does drinking coffee make you a better target for April Fools’ jokes?

Subject:  Invention/Persuasion - Caffeine

Event:  Nescafe instant coffee goes on sale on April Fools’ Day, 1938

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year. -Mark Twain

On this day in 1938, Nescafe instant coffee went on sale for the first time.  The process of creating this soluble powdered coffee was anything but 

instant.  It began 9 years earlier with the Wall Street Crash in 1929.  Like the rest of the economy, coffee prices collapsed.  The necessity of figuring out what to do with tons of unsold coffee sitting in warehouses in Brazil became the mother of invention for a chemist named Max Morgenthaler.  First launched in Switzerland, Nescafe soon became popular globally during World War II because of the fact that it had a longer shelf life than regular coffee.  A majority of Nescafe’s production was used in C Rations for U.S. soldiers (1).

                                                                        Image by Chris from Pixabay 

The release of Nescafe on April First probably has nothing to do with April Fool’s Day; however, there is an interesting 2005 study that raises the question of whether or not coffee might make you more gullible, and therefore a bigger target for April Fool’s shenanigans.  

Researchers from the University of Queensland, Australia, began their study by giving their subjects orange juice; half of the subjects received orange juice spiked with caffeine.  After consuming their orange juice, subjects read well-crafted arguments on controversial issues.  Results revealed that subjects who had consumed caffeine were 35% more likely to be persuaded by the arguments than those who had consumed just orange juice. 

In a second study, instead of reading well-crafted arguments, all subjects read weak arguments. In this second study, whether or not subjects consumed caffeine had no effect on whether or not they were persuaded.  These results lead to the conclusion that instead of making coffee consumers more gullible, caffeine actually makes them more alert and more primed to process cogent, logical arguments (2).

Recall, Recite, Retrieve, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What event sparked the invention of Nescafe instant coffee?  What was the result of the orange juice study as it relates to persuasion?

Today’s Challenge - Instant Coffee, TV Dinners, and ?: An ancient proverb attributed to Plato says that “Necessity is the mother of invention.”  Just as Nescafe instant coffee was born out of the crisis of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, there are many stories about innovations and inventions born of necessity.  One example is the classic TV dinner.  Just after Thanksgiving 1953, the Swanson Company realized that it had overestimated the demand for turkey.  Not only did Swanson have 260 tons of frozen turkey, it also had the turkey stored in refrigerated railroad cars that only kept their contents frozen when moving.  As the trains traveled back and forth between Nebraska and the East Coast, Swanson executives scrambled to generate ideas for what to do with tons of turkey. The answer came from a salesman named Gerry Thomas who had the idea of packaging the turkey in aluminum trays along with stuffing and potatoes.  Thomas got help from Swanson’s bacteriologist Betty Cronin, who solved the problem of how to simultaneously heat the meat and vegetables so that the meals would be safe for consumers to eat (3).  Research other inventions that were born of necessity, and tell the story of how one such invention came to be.

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

April 1, 1956:  On this day the magazine Saturday Review played an April Fools joke on its readers, publishing an article by K. Jason Sitewell entitled, “The Invention of the Period.”  The article claimed to celebrate the life work of Kohmar Pehriad (544-493 BC), the inventor of the comma and the period.  The article also claimed that Pehriad’s son, Apos-Trophe Pehriad invented another less frequently used punctuation mark.

Sources:  

1-”Celebrating 75 years of the Nestlé brand that invented instant coffee.” Nestle.com.

2-Goldstein, Noah J., Steve J. Martin, and Robert B. Cialdini.

Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. Free Press, 2009.

3-Biakolo, Kovie. “A Brief History of the TV Dinner.” Smithsonian Magazine November 2020.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - March 31

What can a 17th-century love poem teach us about how to structure an effective argument?

Subject:  Persuasion/Rhetorical Appeals - “To His Coy Mistress”

Event:  Birthday of English poet Andrew Marvell, 1621

On this day in 1621, English poet Andrew Marvell was born in Hull, England. Marvell was one of the metaphysical poets, a group of 17th-century poets whose verse is characterized by its sharp wit, passionate arguments, and intellectual elaborateness.  

Marvell’s best-known poem “To His Coy Mistress” is probably the single greatest argument ever written in verse.  The poem is a dramatic monologue in which the poet addresses a young woman who is slow to respond to his amorous advances.  

To win the mistress, the poet constructs an elaborate argument, making his case for why she should “act now” and agree to love him.  The poem’s three-part structure also is an excellent example of Aristotle’s three persuasive appeals by character (ethos), by logic (logos), and by emotion (pathos).

In the poem’s first stanza, the speaker begins with ethos, establishing his character and credibility with the mistress.  Here the speaker employs hyperbole, elaborately exaggerating the amount of time he would invest in admiring and cataloging the beauty of the mistress from afar if only time allowed:

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

In the second stanza, the poet makes a sudden shift from the hypothetical to the harsh reality of the real world.  Signaling the transition with “But,” he begins to construct a case based on the logic of their mortality. Devouring time will take his mistress’s beauty, and reason dictates that no one can cheat death.

  

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust;

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Having established his credibility and the logic of his case, the speaker concludes with a climactic appeal to emotion. Here the speaker makes his final pitch, urging the mistress to “act now,” presenting the dramatic image of mating birds of prey in flight.  In the tradition of carpe diem – Latin for “seize the day” – the poet implores the mistress to join him; they cannot stop time, but they can make time fly by having fun.

 

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run. (1)

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  How are each of the three appeals different (logos, pathos, and ethos), and how does the speaker in Marvell’s poem employ them to structure his argument?

Challenge - Head And Heart:  What is an essential item that people need to have in their possession every day in order to be successful?  Brainstorm some essential products that people use and need every day.  Select one of the products, and write a sales pitch, persuading your audience to purchase the product. Use the argument structure employed by Marvell in “To His Coy Mistress.” Begin by thinking about your audience and how you can establish trust with them (ethos).  Next, shift to reason, by laying out your claims and evidence about the product (logos). Finally, make the sale by appealing to the emotions of your audience and by showing them, not just telling them, why they need the product (pathos).

As author Jay Heinrichs explains in his book Thank You for Arguing, Aristotle’s appeals are the Three Musketeers of persuasion:  

Logos, ethos, and pathos appeal to the brain, gut, and heart of your audience.  While our brain tries to sort the facts, our gut tells us whether we can trust the other person, and our heart makes us want to do something about it. (2)

Use the following three essential questions to assist you in constructing your pitch:

-Ethos:  How can I get my audience to believe that I am credible, and how can I make them trust me?

-Logos:  Is my argument reasonable, and how can I organize my points and my evidence so that it is clear and logical?

-Pathos:  How can I show, not just tell my point, and how can I get my audience fired up to feel something?

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

March 31, 1596:  Birthday of Rene Descartes

“It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.”  See THINKER’S ALMANAC - February 11

Sources:

1-Marvell, Andrew. “To His Coy Mistress.”  Poets.org.

2-Heinrichs, Jay. Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007. Print.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - March 30

Before the invention of the pencil eraser, what did people use to erase errors?

Subject:  Invention - Eraser-tipped Pencil

Event: Hyman L. Lipman patents pencil with eraser, 1858

 

The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead. -Robert Breault

On this day in 1858, a Philadelphia stationer named Hyman L. Lipman patented the first eraser-tipped pencil.  This is one invention that has stood the test of time and is also one of the best metaphors there is to remind us that everyone makes mistakes and that no human is faultless.

                                                                            Image by Uwe Baumann from Pixabay 

One common misnomer about pencils is that they contain “lead.” In reality, pencils contain a mineral called graphite.  Legend has it that in the 16th century a shiny black substance was discovered in England’s Lake District under a fallen tree.  The substance was first used by local shepherds to mark their sheep. Because the black material resembled lead, it was called plumbago (from the Latin word for lead, plumbus — the same root that gave us the word “plumber,” someone who works with lead pipes).

A pencil shortage in 18th-century France resulted in the invention of another well-known writing implement.  While at war with England in 1794, Revolutionary France could not access the graphite needed to make pencils.  An engineer named Nicolas-Jacques Conte improvised, combining low-quality graphite with wet clay. Conte then molded the substance into rods and baked it.  This process produced “Crayons Conte” or what we know today as chalk.

Before he lived at Walden Pond, the American writer Henry David Thoreau made a significant contribution to the pencil’s evolution.  After graduating from Harvard College, Thoreau went to work at his family’s pencil-making business. Working with material from a New Hampshire graphite deposit, Thoreau developed his own process for making pencils.  He numbered his pencils from the softest to the hardest using a numbering system from 1 to 4. The No. 2 was the Goldilocks of pencils — not so soft that is smudged easily and not so hard that it breaks easily.

The origin of the most common color for pencils is another story.  Pencils were commonly painted in any number of colors, but in 1889, at the World’s Fair in Paris, a Czech manufacturer Hardtmuth debuted a yellow pencil.  Supposedly made of the finest graphite deposits, the pencil was named Koh-I-Noor, after one of the world’s largest diamonds. The distinct yellow of the Koh-I-Noor became the industry standard for quality, and soon other manufacturers began painting their pencils yellow.

The final key element in the evolution of the pencil came in the 1770s when British polymath Joseph Priestley discovered that a gum harvested from South American trees was effective for rubbing out pencil marks — appropriately he called this substance “rubber.”  Prior to Priestley’s discovery, the most common erasers used were lumps of old bread.

Priestley was also the author of an influential textbook called The Rudiments of English Grammar which was published in 1761 (1).

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: Before pencils had erasers, what was commonly used to erase pencil marks? What well-known American writer contributed to the evolution of the pencil?

Challenge - Ordinary Objects, Extraordinary History: What are some examples of inventions, like the pencil, that are everyday ordinary objects?  Brainstorm a list of some ordinary objects that you encounter every day.  Select one of these objects and do some research on its origin. Write a report providing details about the object’s origin and history.  

Sources:

1-”Trace The Remarkable History Of The Humble Pencil.”  All Things Considered.  NPR.org 11 Oct. 2016.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - March 29

 Why is doodling an effective method of note-taking?

Subject:  Study Strategies - Dual Coding

Event:  Birthday of Allan Urho Paivio, 1925

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. -William Shakespeare

A large part of Shakespeare’s genius was his ability to combine ideas and images.  In the quotation above, for example, the abstract idea of “sorrow” comes alive through the imagery of an invading army.

Another man who understood the power of words and imagery was the Canadian psychologist Allan Paivio, who was born in Ontario on this day in 1925.  Early in his career, he developed a theory related to memory called the “conceptual peg hypothesis,” which states that concrete words are easier to remember than abstract words because concrete words create more vivid mental images.  Words combined with a concrete visual image are easier for the mind to hang onto, like a hat hangs onto a peg.

                                                                Image by Stain_Marylight from Pixabay 

Later he developed his most influential concept, a learning strategy called dual coding, which intentionally combines verbal material with visual materials.  The combination of words and pictures enhances the learner’s memory by engaging two separate mental channels (verbal and visual), giving the learner two ways of remembering the learning (1).

Unlike learning style theory, which attempts to match students to their single best mode of learning -- visual, auditory, or kinesthetic -- dual coding works under the assumption that all human brains learn best when verbal and visual materials are combined.

Teachers and students can employ dual coding with a variety of visual forms, including pictures, diagrams, graphs, tables, graphic organizers, symbols, or cartoons.  It is important to note, however, that in order for the visual representations to be effective and memorable, they must be closely related to the verbal information.  For example, a student might take notes using words on the left-hand column of a piece of paper and then review those notes by generating visual representations in the right-hand column (2).

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason: What is dual coding? What are examples of visual forms that might be used with dual coding?

Challenge - Study Smart With Six Strategies:  Dual coding is one of six study and learning strategies that cognitive scientists have documented as legitimately effective for students to practice and use. The other five are Spacing, Retrieval Practice, Elaboration, Interleaving, and Concrete Examples.  The website “The Learning Scientists” explains each of the six strategies and provides research on the effectiveness of each strategy.  Select one strategy, and explore what it is and how it works.  Write a paragraph explaining to a student how the strategy works.

Sources:

1-Allan Paivio In Memoriam

2-Sumeracki, Megan. “Dual Coding and Learning Styles.” The Learning Scientists.