THINKER'S ALMANAC - June 12

In ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ what was the one simple trick that Scout’s father taught her about how to get along with all kinds of people?

Subject:  Egocentric Bias - Atticus’ Lesson

Event:  The New York Times publishes an article entitled, “A Bias Puts Self at the Center of Everything,” 1984

Don't over-estimate your own merits. . . . don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself.  And . . . don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you.  -Bertrand Russell,

When you get an exam back with a bad grade, are you more likely to say the exam was a poor measure of your knowledge rather than that your poor grade was a result of your own poor preparation?

When your favorite sports team wins, do you say “We won!”?  When that same team loses, do you say “They lost”?

When you think about events from 5 years ago, are you more likely to remember events from your own experience rather than events that were in the news?

If you answered yes to these questions, you’re not alone.  They are a natural outgrowth of a phenomenon known as the egocentric bias, the tendency we all have to overestimate our own importance and influence, and to rely a bit too much on just our own point of view.

                                                        Image by Nimrod Oren from Pixabay

On this day in 1984, writer Daniel Goleman published an article in The New York Times on the egocentric bias entitled, “A Bias That Puts Self at the Center of Everything.” In the article, Goleman presented findings that revealed that the influence of egocentricity is much greater than psychologists had initially thought.  

In a study done at the University of Rochester, for example, subjects participated in group discussions.  After these discussions, individuals evaluated their own contributions to the group.  Based on these self-evaluations, researchers concluded that individuals consistently overestimated how much attention they received from others in the group, how much they influenced the opinions of others, and how much others in the group commented about them.

Another area where the egocentric bias plays a large role is in memory.  Studies reveal that people tend to revise recalled events, enhancing their own importance.  Like an author crafting a drama, they make themselves the protagonist.

According to Dr. Anthony Greewald:

The mind is organized to perceive and store information in terms of the egocentric bias. It serves an essential cognitive function: the bias organizes our experience in a stable and consistent way so that we can later recall it. The self is like the indexing system of a library. Once you arrange information according to one system - what happened to me - if you switch systems you'd be completely lost. (1)

Understanding the egocentric bias helps us realize that our perception of reality is a distorted one and that our memory is skewed by our own first person point of view.  It also helps us understand our tendency to take things more personally than we should. 

An illustration of the egocentric bias and an antidote for how to overcome it can be found in the opening chapters of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. On Scout’s first day of school, seemingly everything that could go wrong, goes wrong, especially when it comes to her relationship with her teacher, Miss Caroline. As Scout tearfully recounts her run-ins with her teacher to her father, she declares that she doesn’t ever want to return to school again.

At this point, Scout’s father, Atticus Finch, shares a valuable lesson with her:

`First of all,' he said, 'if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.' (2)

What Atticus is doing is challenging Scout to overcome her egocentric point of view by expanding her perspective in order to see the world through someone else’s eyes.  The egocentric bias makes us perceive the world from a first person point of view; Atticus reminds us that we can expand our perspective of the world by considering alternative narratives from the points of view of other people. 

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is the egocentric bias, and how does it distort our perception of both the present and the past?

Challenge:  Literature other points of view - a character

ALSO ON THIS DAY:

June 12, 1942:  On this day a 13-year-old girl named Anne Frank received a birthday gift -- a red and white checkered autograph book.  Instead of collecting the signatures of others in the book, Anne decided to use it as a diary to record her own thoughts. She spent 25 months hiding in an annex above her father’s office in Amsterdam before she and her family were betrayed, arrested, and transported to Nazi concentration camps.  Anne died of typhus in 1945 while in the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.  In her diary, Anne’s remarkable courage and vivid insights into the human condition live on.  Anned’s diary has inspired millions of readers around the world and has been translated into 67 languages.

Sources:

1-Goleman, Daniel. “A BIAS PUTS SELF AT CENTER OF EVERYTHING.”  The New York Times, 12 June 1984.

2-Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York :Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - June 11

How can unconscious bias be deadly?

Subject:  Unconscious Bias - Hurricane Study

Event:  Nicholas Kristof penned a column entitled, “She Gets No Respect,” 2014

It is easier for a man to burn down his own house than to get rid of his prejudices. -Roger Bacon

Why would a hurricane named Alexandra be deadlier than an identical hurricane named Alexander?

This is the question that syndicated columnist Nicholas Kristof asked at the beginning of an editorial published in The New York Times on this day in 2014.

The answer to the question comes from a study by researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Arizona State University.  What the researchers found studying the data on over sixty hurricanes was that female-named hurricanes resulted in twice as many casualties as male-named hurricanes.  In addition to looking at actual casualties in hurricanes, the researchers also asked people to hypothetically predict how intense and risky a female-named hurricane might be versus a male-named hurricane.  Consistently people -- including women -- predicted that a male hurricane would be more violent than a female hurricane.

                                                            Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

What this study illustrates is that our prejudices and biases related to gender or race are not always overt; instead, these biases are frequently unconscious, even, as Kristof says, “among well-meaning, enlightened people who embrace equality.”  

Other studies asked professors to evaluate mythical candidate applications for a laboratory position at a university.  The only difference between the otherwise identical applications was that some had male names and some had female names.  The male names were not only rated higher, but they were also recommended for a significantly higher salary (1).

In a 2014 interview, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg shared her concerns about unconscious bias as well as a method by which it might be eliminated:

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at. My favorite example is the symphony orchestra. When I was growing up, there were no women in orchestras. Auditioners thought they could tell the difference between a woman playing and a man. Some intelligent person devised a simple solution: Drop a curtain between the auditioners and the people trying out. And, lo and behold, women began to get jobs in symphony orchestras. (2)

Like Ginsberg, Nicholas Kristof believes that the hidden nature of unconscious bias makes it difficult to detect; nevertheless, he believes it must still be confronted:

This deep bias is as elusive as it is pernicious, but a start is to confront and discuss it.  Perhaps hurricanes, by catching us out, can help us face our own chauvinism.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  How do the names of hurricanes relate to unconscious bias?

Challenge:   Similar by Not Synonymous

“Bias” and “prejudice” are two words that are frequently used interchangeably; however, they are different.  Do some research on the definitions of these two words and write a paragraph where you compare their meanings, making a distinction between how the words are different.

Sources:

1-Kristof, Nicholas.  “She Gets No Respect.”  The New York Times 11 June 2014.

2-Weisberg, Jessica. “Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg In Her Own Words.”  Elle magazine September 2020.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - June 10

When Alexander the Great visited the cynic philosopher Diogenes and asked if there was anything that he wanted, what did Diogenes request?

Subject:  Cynicism - The Meeting of Diogenes and Alexander

Event:  Both Alexander and Diogenes die, 323 B.C.

Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam—and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer barrel?  -Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Tragedy of the Prince of Denmark

On this day in 323 BC, according to legend, an ancient king and an ancient philosopher died.

The king was Alexander the Great, the Macedonian general who conquered most of the ancient world.  As a youth, Alexander was tutored by the philosopher Aristotle, and his favorite author was Homer. Legend says that he slept with a copy of the Iliad and a dagger under his pillow.  After earning his first military victory at the age of 18, Alexander fought for the next 15 years with an undefeated record in battle.  When Alexander realized there were no more worlds to conquer, he wept.

                                                    Image by Alexander from Pixabay

The ancient philosopher was Diogenes the Cynic.  Diogenes believed in living a life free of conventions and constraints.  He eschewed possessions and famously made his home in a large discarded clay jar.  He once owned a wooden cup, but discarded it one day when he witnessed a young boy using his cupped bare hands to drink water.  Diogenes was known to walk through the marketplace in the middle of the day carrying a lighted lamp. When asked why he carried the lamp and inspected the faces of those he met, Diogenes answered, “I am trying to find a man.”

Although these two men died in separate parts of the world — Alexander in Babylon and Diogenes in Corinth — the two men are connected in cultural memory through one of history’s best-known anecdotes.

The story goes that the young Alexander once made a visit to Diogenes’ hometown of Corinth.  Everyone flocked to catch a glimpse of the great leader, to hear him speak, and to gain his favor — everyone that is but Diogenes.  Since Diogenes did not come to see him, Alexander was determined to make a personal visit to see the philosopher. Accompanied by a throng of admirers, Alexander approached Diogenes’ home, the large barrel-shaped jar.  Diogenes did not greet the young conqueror; in fact, he didn’t even stand. Instead, he simply sat up on one elbow. After a short period of awkward silence, Alexander asked: “Diogenes, is there anything I can do for you?”

“Yes,” Diogenes replied, “Stand to one side.  You’re blocking the sunlight.”

The crowd was hushed and amazed at Diogenes’ insolence, but Alexander was unphased.  He simply turned away and said quietly, “If I were not Alexander, I should be Diogenes.”

More than one ancient biographer wrote that Alexander and Diogenes died on the same day, June 10, 323 BC.  The exact cause of the two men’s deaths is not exactly clear. Although it might be expected that the warrior Alexander died in battle, no such report exists.  Instead accounts of his death conflict. Some say he died of poisoning, others of malaria or typhoid fever. Only 32 years of age at his death, Alexander’s body was submerged in a vat of honey to stave off decay.

As for the death of Diogenes, there are also conflicting accounts.  One account claims he simply held his breath, another claims he became ill after eating raw octopus, and still another claims he died of infection from a dog bite.

This last possibility is especially ironic, considering that Diogenes’ creed of Cynicism means “doggishness.”  In his History of Cynicism, the scholar R. Dudley explains why the Cynics embraced a dog’s life:

There are four reasons why the Cynics are so named. First because of the indifference of their way of life, for they make a cult of indifference and, like dogs, eat and make love in public, go barefoot, and sleep in tubs and at crossroads. The second reason is that the dog is a shameless animal, and they make a cult of shamelessness, not as being beneath modesty, but as superior to it. The third reason is that the dog is a good guard, and they guard the tenets of their philosophy. The fourth reason is that the dog is a discriminating animal which can distinguish between its friends and enemies. So do they recognize as friends those who are suited to philosophy, and receive them kindly, while those unfitted they drive away, like dogs, by barking at them. (2)

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  From what animal does the school of philosophers called the Cynics take its name, and why is this appropriate?

Challenge - From History to Story:  Who are some great people from the past who you would like to know more about?  What are some specific stories that include one or more of these individuals?  Brainstorm a list of people who are of interest to you.  Do a bit of research to discover an anecdote about one of them. Before you begin writing, however, note the difference between the words “historical” and “historic.”  “Historical” refers to anything or anyone from the past; “historic,” in contrast, refers to something or someone important from the past. Therefore, when you do your research on a “historic anecdote” focus on important or famous people from the past.  Tell the story of a single specific incident using your own words. 

Sources:

 1-Highet, Gilbert.  “Diogenes And Alexander."

2-Dudley, R. A History of Cynicism.  Cambridge University Press, 1937.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - June 9

What were the four words that Walt Disney used to define success?

Subject:  Innovation - Disney’s Four Cs 

Event:  Debut of Donald Duck in the cartoon “The Wise Little Hen.”

Walt Disney began his career as an illustrator while he was serving as a soldier in France during World War I.  He supplemented his soldier’s salary by drawing and selling caricatures of his comrades in arms.  They were more than happy to buy them so they could sent them home to their families in the United States.  

After the war he worked for the Kansas City Slide Company, drawing advertisements that were projected onto movie screens.  Seeing his drawings on the big screen fueled Disney’s imagination:  Would it be possible to combine moving pictures with his cartoons?  Although Disney did not invent animation, he did become the first to create animated cartoons that were more than just advertisements.  On November 18, 1928, Disney’s Steamboat Willie premiered introducing the world to his most famous creation Mickey Mouse.  Five years later, on this day in 1934, Disney introduced another of his iconic cartoon characters Donald Duck in The Wise Little Hen.

                                                Image by Welcome to All ! ツ from Pixabay

What truly made Disney an iconoclast, however, was his idea of producing a full-length animated film.  Cartoons were seen as light entertainment to be shown before a film, but no one -- besides Disney -- ever imagined that a long cartoon feature could become a box office hit.  Even though banks rejected his loan applications for the project and even though his critics called his project “Disney’s Folly,” Walt was undeterred.  On December 21, 1937, Snow White debuted.  It grossed $8 million dollars, a record for its time.

The profits from Snow White propelled Disney’s other projects and made his company a great success.  In 1955. he fulfilled another of his imaginative visions by building and opening the theme park Disneyland in Anaheim, California.  Just like with Snow White, his critics said the project was too risky and was doomed to failure.  Walt didn’t listen and forged ahead to make his dream come true.  

Walt Disney summarized his recipe for success in four words:

“I can’t believe that there are any heights that can’t be scared by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true.  This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in Four Cs.  They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence” (1).

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What are Walt Disney’s Four Cs and how did his work exemplify them?

Sources:

1-Berns, Gregory.  Iconoclast:  A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently.  Boston, Massachusetts:  Harvard Business Press, 1020 (37-9).

THINKER'S ALMANAC - June 8

 

Subject:  Free Speech - The Bill of Rights and Winston Smith’s Diary

Event:  The Bill of Rights presented to Congress, 1789; Orwell’s 1984 published, 1949

Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. -John Adams

On this day in 1789,  a draft of the Bill of Rights was presented to the First Federal Congress.  The United States Constitution had been ratified on September 17, 1787.  It established the organization of the central government and the elaborate system of checks and balances on the power of the three branches.  What was not included in the Constitution at this time, however, was an explanation of how the powers of the central government should be balanced against the rights and liberties of the people.

Beginning with the Magna Carta, signed by King John on June 15, 1215, there is a long history of attempts to balance the power of the state or the Crown against the power of the individual.  The Bill of Rights is a high-water mark in this history.

Credit for championing the draft of the Bill of Rights goes to James Madison, who would later become the fourth President of the United States.  Madison had been the major architect of the document that was written at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and in 1789, he demonstrated the same breadth of knowledge and the same skill in forming compromises as he argued for the Bill of Rights.

Madison’s first draft of 17 amendments was approved by the House of Representatives, but 5 of the amendments were later shot down by the Senate.  The state legislatures would later remove two more amendments.  The first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, were finally adopted on December 15, 1791 (1).

Of all the Bill of Rights’ amendments, it is the First Amendment that is best known and most hallowed.  And within this one amendment are packed five essential rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It’s a hard task to rank these rights from most important to least important, but if we focus on the one essential liberty that makes all others possible, it is freedom of speech.  One writer who made vigorous arguments for free speech was Christopher Hitchings (1949-2011), the English author and critic who eventually became an American citizen:  

The right of others to free expression is part of my own. If someone’s voice is silenced, then I am deprived of the right to hear. Moreover, I have never met nor heard of anybody I would trust with the job of deciding in advance what it might be permissible for me or anyone else to say or read. That freedom of expression consists of being able to tell people what they may not wish to hear, and that it must extend, above all, to those who think differently is, to me, self-evident.

In supporting his case for free speech, Hitchings continues with a history lesson, illustrating that the freedom of the people is inextricably linked with their freedom to express what is on their minds:

From the predawn of human history, despots have relied on the idea that, quite literally, their word is law, or absolute. Pre-Roman and Roman emperors sought to cloak this in the idea that they themselves were supra-human and had themselves deified in their own lifetimes. Later tyrants claimed to rule by “the divine right of kings,” an assertion that didn’t end until the 18th century. All modern successors, from Hitler to Khomeini to Kim Jong-il, have insisted that only one man or one party or one book represents the absolute truth, and to challenge it is folly or worse. But all it takes is one little boy to blurt out the inconvenient truth that the emperor is as naked as the day he was born, and with that, the entire edifice of absolutism begins to crumble. (2)

On the same day we celebrate the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights,  we can coincidentally look at a piece of writing that warns us not to take those freedoms for granted.  It was on this day in 1949 that George Orwell’s novel 1984 was published.

Orwell imagines a dystopian future where a one-party government is in a perpetual state of war and is led by an all-seeing but unseen leader called Big Brother.  In this society, not only is writing and speaking your mind forbidden, but also is thinking wrong thoughts, i.e., “thought crime.”  

In the novel’s opening chapter, the protagonist Winston Smith commits an act of rebellion, an act that we all take for granted. In the world of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the simple act that Winston performs could lead to punishment by death or a sentence of twenty-five years of forced labor.  Facing a Rubicon moment, Winston contemplates his act of defiance:

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. . . . He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him.. . .

Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. . . .

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  Besides today’s date, what is the connection between the U.S. Bill of Rights and George Orwell’s novel 1984?

Challenge - Know Your Rights:  Read all of the original ten amendments in the Bill of Rights.  Select one that you find interesting and do a bit of research on its history.  What Supreme Court cases, for example, have been decided based on or in support of this right?

Sources:  

1-The National Constitution Center. “On this day: James Madison introduces the Bill of Rights.”  8 June 2022.

2-Hitchens, Christopher.  Why Even Hate Speech Needs to Be Protected.  Reader’s Digest 24 October 2022.

THINKER'S ALMANAC - June 7

Although students don’t like them, why is a pop quiz actually a good thing?

Subject:  Study Strategies - Testing Effect

Event:  Premier of the television quiz show The $64,000 Question

There is always a place I can take someone's curiosity and land where they end up enlightened when we're done. That's my challenge as an educator. No one is dumb who is curious. The people who don't ask questions remain clueless throughout their lives. -Neil deGrasse Tyson

On this day in 1955, the quiz show the $64,000 Question premiered on CBS.  Today we take game shows for granted, but in the early days of television, these shows were high stakes dramas that mesmerized the television audience and posted record ratings.  The $64,000 Question spawned a number of successful imitators:  The Big Surprise, Dotto, Tic Tac Dough, and Twenty One.

                                                                Image by Garaz from Pixabay

The success of the quiz shows ended, however, in 1958 when a scandal surfaced where evidence showed that the results of the shows were rigged.  As a result, the quiz show craze died, and the networks stopped airing them (1).  Quiz shows did not gain favor with the public again until the 1960s when shows like Jeopardy began to attract viewers. (see THINKER’S ALMANAC - March 20).  At this point, the “quiz shows” were rebranded as “game shows.”

It is interesting that tracking down the history of the word “quiz” has left lexicographers somewhat quizzical.

One story involves James Daly, a theater manager in Dublin.  In 1791, Daly supposedly made a bet with a friend, saying he could introduce a new word into the language within a single day.  He then created the nounce -- or nonsense word “quiz” and paid people to write the word in chalk on walls throughout the city.  By the end of the day, the word was on everyone’s lips (2).

Although this is a good story, it probably is not true.  Instead, the word “quiz” is probably just a clipped version of the word “inquisitive,” an adjective meaning “unduly curious and inquiring.”

While the origin of the word “quiz” might not be certain, one thing is fairly clear:  in school, most students are not big fans of quizzes.  Counterintuitively, however, educational researchers have documented quizzes, or testing, as one of the best ways to retain learning.  The testing effect -- also known as retrieval practice -- is a learning strategy where students practice recalling what they have learned by writing it down or reciting it out loud without looking at their notes.

In a 2011 study, students were evaluated on their ability to retain and apply information from a reading passage.  Some students simply read the passage, others read and re-read the passage, and a third group read the passage, and then paused periodically to practice retrieval by writing down what they remembered without looking back at the passage.  

The results of the study revealed when students were tested one week after reading the passages, the group that applied retrieval practice as a strategy not only remembered more but was also better able to apply their knowledge to new contexts (3).

The testing effect works because the conscious effort of retrieving information builds connections in the brain and strengthens memory.  The process of forgetting and remembering also provides feedback.  While re-reading a passage can create an illusion of understanding, the active process of retrieving the information without notes provides the students with metacognitive feedback:  via retrieval without notes, students can determine what they truly know versus what they need to study further.

Recall, Retrieve, Recite, Ruminate, Reflect, Reason:  What is the testing effect, and what evidence shows its effectiveness?

Challenge - One Week In June:  A Quiz

Based on your reading of the seven entries for June 1 through 7, write seven quiz questions that can be answered with one or two word answers.

Sources:

1-The Museum of Broadcast Communications. “$64,000 Question.”

2-Manswer, Martin.  The Guinness Book of Words (2nd Edition).  Middlesex:  Guinness Publishing Ltd., 1988.

3-Karpicke, Jeffrey D. and Janell R. Blunt. “Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping.”  Science, Volume 331, Issue 6018 11 Feb. 2011.