These are the psychological tricks both sides of the EU debate are playing on you - and how to recognise them

What sounds worse: a shortfall of 6 per cent of GDP resulting from Brexit, or a loss of £4,300 per household?

Ben Chu in The Independent


Imagine you’re lucky. Imagine you receive £50 from a benefactor. But, oh dear, there’s a problem with the gift. It turns out too much was paid out. There has to be a financial correction. So you’re faced with a choice.

So would you rather keep £20? Or lose £30? Think very quickly. Did you initially lean towards keeping £20? Many people do. But of course they amount to the same thing. You’d still have £20 whichever option you picked.

So what’s going on? Why did £20 look more appealing? That’s the brain’s “system one” at work, according to psychologists. Studies show that the reactive human mind sees the “keep” flashing in red lights before there’s any mental arithmetic (even before trivial calculations such as subtracting £30 from £50). And the word “loss” is also deeply off-putting to the mind’s system one. A quick decision framed as a straight choice between “keep” and “lose” will usually see “lose” rejected.

The mental arithmetic is “system two” and it takes much longer to be activated in most of us than system one. Sadly, many of us don’t even bother activating system two before making decisions at all.

Advertisers are aware of this bias. That’s why they often frame propositions in terms of how much money people can keep rather than how much they’ve lost in the past. “Keep more of your savings income by opening an ISA”, “Keep more of your money when you shop with us”, and so on.

Political advertisers are on to it too. That’s why the Leave campaign ahead of June’s European Union referendum have been emphasising so heavily the prize of keeping the UK’s £13bn annual contribution to the EU Budget. They emphasise what we can keep by voting to leave. Yet the Remain campaign is familiar with this tactic too. That’s why they emphasise the 3m UK jobs “linked to trade with the rest of Europe”. We naturally want to keep all those jobs, don’t we?

Both claims are actually tendentious. The £13bn is the gross contribution of the UK to Brussels – it doesn’t account for the money the UK receives back. And it’s silly to imply that 3m jobs would disappear overnight in the event of a Brexit. That would only happen if all trade between Britain and the Continent came to a sudden halt – something no one seriously expects. But the campaigners are not really trying to impart useful information with their soundbites – they’re aiming at the system one part of your brain.

That’s by no means the only psychological bias battleground in this referendum campaign. Psychologists talk of the power of “framing”. Which sounds more appealing: 90 per cent fat-free or 10 per cent fat? Advertisers know the answer, which is why one never sees the latter formulation even though they describe the same product.

Now consider which sounds like a more compelling argument in the context of an EU membership vote. “Almost half of everything we sell to the rest of the world we sell to Europe,” says the Stronger in Europe campaign. “British reliance on trade with the EU has fallen to an all-time low,” proclaim the Outers. The fact that both sound compelling - and both describe the same statistics - shows that the two campaigns grasp the importance of framing.

There’s more. What sounds worse: a shortfall of 6 per cent of GDP resulting from Brexit, or a loss of £4,300 per household? For many people it will be the latter figure, heavily highlighted by George Osborne yesterday. But, again, they amount to the same thing. £4,300 is merely the 6 per cent of GDP translated into cash terms and divided by all the 26m households in the country.

So why does £4,300 sound more off-putting to most people? Here we have the “ratio bias” at work. In any ratio there is the numerator and the denominator. In the two statistics above “6” and “£4,400” are the numerators. And “GDP” and “per household” are the denominators. Studies show that the system one part of our brain is more sensitive to big numbers in the numerator of ratios, and often neglects the denominators. So £4,300 sets off larger movements in many brains because, quite simply, it’s a bigger sounding figure than 6.

Consider another example. Which is the more compelling fact: “200,000 UK businesses trade with the EU” or: “Only 6 per cent of UK firms export to the EU”? The first is from the Stronger in Europe website. The second is from Vote Leave. Here the Outers are trying to use the ratio bias to minimise the sense of importance of the EU as a trading partner for British firms - and the Inners are doing precisely the opposite.

We are profoundly influenced by the framing of statistics. Quite understandably, politicians and campaigners seek to manipulate your system one brain. “I just feel I don’t know who to trust and I need a voice I can trust,” said a member of a panel of “undecided” referendum voters on the BBC’s Newsnight last night. But that benign and trustworthy figure does not exist. The way the facts are laid out will depend on the way the person wants the facts to be framed. Asking for someone to do the job for you - and placing your trust in them - essentially means asking that person to steer you in one way or the other.

If people genuinely want to make up their minds without bias, they are on their own. And their only trustworthy guide is their own brain’s system two.

What the great degree rip-off means for graduates: low pay and high debt

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

 

‘Ministers needed to sell universities to teenagers and their families – and in the process they have mis-sold them.’ Illustration: Bill Bragg



A few years back, I got my knuckles rapped by a government minister. In public. It was 2010: David Cameron had just come to power, and he was about to thrust university students into a new regime of higher tuition fees and debt.

Against that backdrop, I’d written a column criticising the way in which both Labour and Conservative governments marketed degrees as being some kind of social-mobility jetpack, zooming their wearers to more money and high-powered jobs. It was no such guarantee, I said, citing among other things Whitehall’s own plunging estimates of how much more graduates earn over a lifetime. Graduates, I said, would “probably end up doing similar work to their school-leaver parents – only with a debilitatingly large debt around their necks”.

For David Willetts, then universities minister, this was sheer and unpalatable sauce. In a speech to the annual conference of Universities UK, representing the top management of higher education, he named me – then tried to shame me. I was “wrong”, he claimed. Previous governments had indeed claimed that a graduate could expect to pull in £400,000 more over their lifetime than someone who hadn’t been to university. And, yes, his officials had knocked that estimate down to £100,000. But the difference, you see, was nothing to do with the increase in graduates – but “an improved methodology”. So I was “not comparing like with like”. Two Brains, one slap!

Willetts has since left parliament and gone to a far, far better place: the Resolution Foundation, an inequality thinktank that does much better work than the coalition government ever managed. But looking back, I shouldn’t have been surprised by either the reproof or the forum in which it was made. To sprinkle even a little doubt over the instrumental value of a degree is to take on both the well-paid managers of our universities, and Whitehall orthodoxy.

Higher education is “a phenomenal investment”, Conservative ministers tell us – even with tuition fees at nine grand a year. Repayments are only the equivalent of one “posh coffee” a day, according to the then universities minister Greg Clark (who is now communities secretary). “I think people recognise that that is a phenomenal investment,” he said. “It’s not just a good investment for the student, but actually it’s a good investment for the taxpayer.” I’ve seen ads on daytime TV for loans that do a softer sell than that.

And the marketing is still wrong. Take a look at research published last week by a team of economists from Cambridge, Harvard and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. They found that at 23 universities men typically earned less even 10 years after graduating than their counterparts who’d never been. The disparities are so yawningly wide that it makes a nonsense of talking about the “graduate premium”.

A student of economics at the LSE may walk into a City job and very soon be earning six figures. Their life and career will be utterly different from someone doing business studies, say, at a post-1992 university close to home in the north-east, and then chooses to work in the same area. Yet both are deluged with the official and industrial marketing that a mortar board and gown is worth an extra £100,000 over a lifetime.

Both New Labour and the dwindling band of Cameronian Conservatives have peddled the line that higher education breaks down class barriers. Again, untrue: last week’s research shows that students from the richest families did better than everyone else in the graduate job market – and earned far more than even those who’d done the same course at the same university at the same time.

Ministers needed to sell universities to teenagers and their families – and in the process they have mis-sold them. In this new world of tuition fees and debt, children and their parents have been assured that degrees earn big salaries. At the same time, voters have been told that higher education brings social mobility. Both claims have been made far too broadly – and the losers are those now coming out of university with 50 grand owing to the student loan company, a socking great overdraft and the discovery that internships and coffee shops are the only prospects.

I and others have argued down the years that there is no point in creating more graduates unless you have more graduate-level jobs. Such a position strikes me as being so obvious as to be crass, but it has been ignored by successive governments.

The result can be seen in research published last August by the Oxford economists Ken Mayhew and Craig Holmes. They found that the UK now has proportionately more graduates than any other rich country bar Iceland – yet uses their brains much less than most other countries: the “underutilisation” of graduates – at work but not using their skills – is higher in the UK than anywhere in the EU bar Romania, Greece, Croatia, Latvia and Slovenia.

So what are our graduates doing? Jobs that previously didn’t need a degree. Over one in 10 childminders (11.5%, according to the 2014 Labour Force Survey) are graduates. One in six call-centre staff have degrees, as do about one in four of all air cabin crew and theme-park attendants. In a labour market flooded with graduates, picky employers are now able to take the CVs boasting a university education. And so any young person who didn’t go to university now stands to be treated as a second-class employee.

And universities – with the connivance of their vice-chancellors and marketing departments – have allowed themselves to be sold to the public largely as CV-finishing schools. It is a gross act of vandalism to have committed on a higher education system that the rest of the world once admired. And it has displaced all the other values that accrue both to the individual and to society from education. Critical thinking, public knowledge? You won’t get much change for those from a government that plans to gag academics from using their publicly funded research to question public policy and hold politicians to account.

As for Willetts, he owes me an apology. But nothing like as big as the one he and his colleagues owe to tens of thousands of university graduates, stuck in low-paying jobs that don’t use their expensively acquired skills and certainly don’t pay off their vast debts.

Three-day working week 'optimal for over-40s'

• 18 April 2016
 
• From the sectionBBC Business

Image copyrightAP

Workers aged over 40 perform at their best if they work three days a week, according to economic researchers.

Their research analysed the work habits and brain test results of about 3,000 men and 3,500 women aged over 40 in Australia.

Their calculations suggest a part-time job keeps the brain stimulated, while avoiding exhaustion and stress.

The researchers said this needed to be taken into consideration as many countries raise their retirement age.

Double-edged sword

Data for the study was drawn from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, which is conducted by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research at the University of Melbourne.

It looks at people's economic and subjective well-being, family structures, and employment.

Those taking part were asked to read words aloud, to recite lists of numbers backwards and to match letters and numbers under time pressure.

In general terms, those participants who worked about 25 hours a week tended to achieve the best scores.

"Work can be a double-edged sword, in that it can stimulate brain activity, but at the same time, long working hours and certain types of tasks can cause fatigue and stress which potentially damage cognitive functions," the report said.

Colin McKenzie, professor of economics at Keio University who took part in the research, said it would appear that working extremely long hours was more damaging than not working at all on brain function.

The figures suggest that the cognitive ability of those working about 60 hours a week can be lower than those who are not employed.

However, Geraint Johnes, professor of economics at Lancaster University Management School, said: "The research looks only at over-40s, and so cannot make the claim that over-40s are different from any other workers.

"What the authors find is that cognitive functioning improves up to the point at which workers work 25 hours a week and declines thereafter."

He added: "Actually, at first the decline is very marginal, and there is not much of an effect as working hours rise to 35 hours per week. Beyond 40 hours per week, the decline is much more rapid."

'No women, no rape': The warped logic of Harvard's students should disturb us all

Radhika Sanghani in The Telegraph


An all-male elite Harvard club has chosen 2016 as the year that it breaks a historic silence. In the 225 years of its existence, it has barely ever released a public statement. But as pressure mounted on the group to ditch its sexist ‘no women’ policy, the Porcellian went public.

Charles M. Storey, its president, defended the club’s single-gender status in an email to student paper The Crimson:

“Given our policies, we are mystified as to why the current administration feels that forcing our club to accept female members would reduce the incidence of sexual assault on campus. Forcing single gender organisations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Storey’s defence of the club’s boys’ only rule is that it keeps women safe. According to his logic, inviting women into the group would increase sexual misconduct. For their own safety, they’re better off not trying to join. Got it?

This is clearly an appalling defence on many levels. But what’s worse is the fact that a large number of students agree.

Though Storey himself issued an apology shortly after a backlash, (“Unfortunately, I chose my words poorly and it came out all wrong. This failure has led to extreme and unfortunate misinterpretations, which were not my intentions at all”) other students have taken to the paper’s website to defend him.

“Porcellian has no female members and no guests. Ergo no risk of the ladies getting assaulted. If the risk today is zero percent, it can only get worse is the club goes coed,” justified one commenter.

Another spelled out that “statistically speaking, any change in membership cannot decrease sexual assaults as Harvard claims. As a matter of fact, they could only stay zero or potentially increase, which is exactly what the club stated.”


A third echoed their views, agreeing that what Storey had said was 'obvious' - "no sexual assault of women can occur when no women are present."

It's hard to believe just how literally people are taking Storey's words. To them, it's perfectly logical that if a woman is present there's a higher chance of sexual assault - 'ergo' women should steer clear of male-only clubs.

In other words: no women, no rape.

Their logic is chilling. It might all add up ‘statistically’ but is that really how we should be looking at rape? If we followed that argument through to its logical conclusion, we'd be living in a world where men and women are segregated simply because it’s 'safer’.

Women-only public transport would be the norm, and the possibility of gender-neutral loos wouldn't even exist. Non-binary people would be ostracised from society and everything from socialising to education would become boys vs girls.

This dystopian future could ‘statistically’ lead to lower sexual assault and rape rates, but how is that feasible in a modern society? We need to be moving forward not backwards. The answer does not and never will lie in segregation.

If we want to stop sexual assault from happening, we need to tackle rape culture. On university campuses, male-only clubs are a good place to start. They are generally known to be rife with misogyny. And when women are not present, it's harder for men to see them as equals who deserve respect. Little wonder they often end up as the butt of crude jokes. The same can go the other way - and neither attitude is healthy.

Men and women need to be equal - and that means integration.

In 2016, this should be an accepted truth. The fact that a group of Harvard students - supposedly the brightest minds in America - clearly don’t understand that is incredibly worrying. They're so busy looking at rape culture ‘statistically’ they’re missing the obvious: men and women should be able to spend time together without the assumption of sexual misconduct.

That their time at Harvard hasn't yet taught them that, is deeply worrying indeed.

Are you Alright?

By Lucinda Williams 

Lyrics:

Are you alright?

All the sudden you went away.

Are you alright?

I hope you come back around someday.

Are you alright?

I haven't seen you in a real long time.

Are you alright?

Could you give me some kind of sign.

Are you alright?

I looked around me and you were gone.

Are you alright?

I feel like there must be something wrong.

Are you alright?

'Cause it seems like you disappeared.

Are you alright?

'Cause I been feeling a little scared.

Are you alright?

Chorus:

Are you sleeping through the night?

Do you have someone to hold you tight?

Do you have someone to hang out with?

Do you have someone to hug and kiss you,

Hug and kiss you,Hug and kiss you?

Are you alright?

Are you alright?

Is there something been bothering you?

Are you alright?

I wish you'd give me a little clue.

Are you alright?

Is there something you wanna say?

Are you alright?

Just tell me that you're okay.

Are you alright?

'Cause you took off without a word.

Are you alright?

You flew away like a little bird.

Are you alright?

Is there anything I can do?

Are you alright?

'Cause I need to hear from you.

Are you alright?

Chorus

Are you alright?

Are you alright?

Hey... 

Music to celebrate Irinjalakuda's Koodalmanickyakshetram Ultsavam starting 18 April

Panchari Melam

Pavizhamallithara Melam

Nadappura Melam

Pandi Melam

Ilanjithara Melam

How to have sex with the same person for the rest of your life

The Guardian

 

‘Spending too much time with your partner may be the problem.’ Photograph: Microzoa/Getty Images


1 Accept that having sex with the same person for the rest of your life – unless it’s yourself (see later) – is hard and, at times, boring. But not impossible. The problem – actually, there are several and also lots of contradictions – is that the received wisdom has always been to spend more time with your partner to build something called “intimacy”, which will lead to The Sex. Actually, this may be wrong.

2 Spending too much time with your partner may be the problem. Do romantic weekends make you feel really unromantic and panicked? Seeing someone all the time is not sexy after the first few months. It leads to something called habituation, which must be avoided at all costs if you want to continue having sex with your partner. Habituation is when you stop really seeing someone/thing because you see them all the time, ie taking someone for granted, which leads to hating their guts. In one survey, a common answer to the question “When do you feel most attracted to your partner?” was “When they weren’t there.” This is because anticipation is a powerful aphrodisiac and distance lets erotic imagination back in, which leads to fantasy. Unfortunately, it’s often cruelly crushed when your partner comes back into view.

3 The major stumbling block to sex in a long-term relationship is that you’re after two opposing things: security, reliability – lovely anchoring things like that which make you feel safe – but you also want fire, passion, risk, danger, newness. The two camps are opposed. If you have one, you can’t have the other.

4 The answer is to try to get pockets of distance. Make sure you stay true to yourself. Do things for yourself and by yourself; socialise on your own sometimes. In another survey, respondents said that they found their partners sexiest when the partners were in their element: the life and soul of the party, doing a job really well. Being “other” to the person they knew as reliable and as their partner. Having sex at your partner’s place of work may be something to consider if you can avoid CCTV. You don’t want to watch yourself having sex with the same person over and over again on YouTube because you have become a meme.

5 All this said, you do need to spend some quality time together to keep the bonds going. Sharing good experiences is better than spending your money on stuff for each other. This is because memories of experiences shared become more golden with the passing of time, unlike mere things you get used to (see habituation). Also you can only throw things at each other in an argument that leads to sex if you are in a film starring Sophia Loren. In real life, it leads to hate and mess.

6 Masturbation is basically having sex with the same person for all of your life, yet no one gets sick of that. Why? Because you are safe to go into your own private head-place, and the chances are that there is a real dissonance between the erotic you and the you in the real world. The erotic you has no place in your every day life, the erotic you may not be very responsible (responsibility kills sex drive). The erotic you only has one goal. Orgasm. It isn’t the point, they always tell you that in sex columns, but it’s nice – otherwise, come on, what is the point of all that effort? It’s this distance that’s at the heart of keeping an erotic charge between you and your partner. Consider separate bedrooms.

7 Learn the difference between wanting someone and neediness. The first is sexy, the latter isn’t. Looking after someone because you want to is different from one person being cast in the parenting role to the other, which isn’t sexy at all and will lead to a lack of sex with your partner and, possibly, lots of sex with someone else who doesn’t need looking after.

8 Don’t expect your partner to be everything to you. There’s an oft quoted phrase in relationship circles: “don’t expect your partner to do the job a whole village once did.” Also be realistic: two centuries ago you’d probably be dead by the age of 50, now marriages can last longer.

9 But! Take solace in the fact that older people do have more sex. Last year, a study found that if you’ve been married to the same person for 65 years, you have more sex than you did at your 50th wedding anniversary.

10 The secret of sex with the same person for ever, says Esther Perel, the author of Mating in Captivity, is letting go of “the myth of spontaneity. Committed sex is willful, premeditated, focused and present”. She also suggests good tools for talking with your partner (or to find out things about yourself), for example, start conversations with: “I shut myself off when …” and “I turn myself on when …”