Freakonomics on Suicide?

It was on a surprising topic for economics, but Freakonomics often goes outside the usual scope.  They looked at suicide.  The last segment was the best, but all of it was at least worth skimming through (is there an audio version of skimming?). I recommend listening to the whole thing, even if you haven’t ever had suicidal thoughts.

But what I want to talk about today were three specific findings.  Two are related to who is likely to commit suicide.  What they found is that depressed people do a kind of cost/benefit analysis.  They think of the burden required to live (since they are depressed, living is perceived as a lot of work).  They also think about their balance of happiness and sadness.  If the burden is worse than the net happiness, then they are likely to commit suicide. Of course, their perception is totally warped, but that is the basic mental process.

The second finding is that the balance is perceived relative to their community.  So ironically, the better off the society is, the more likely the depressed person is to commit suicide.  If there were an excuse like everyone in the neighborhood is equally bad off, then they don’t feel so bad.  But if everyone else is doing well, the balance seems worse.  This corresponds well with the happiness research, which shows that a person’s (not just depressed people) happiness is directly related to how well they are doing compared to others in the community.

Another topic that they talked about is that there are certain things that trigger suicide among people who are already likely.  So these things don’t cause suicide, but if someone is already predisposed, this increases the likelihood that they will do it.  One of these is media coverage.  In Sweden they tried an experiment.  There was a rash of suicides from people jumping in front of trains.  The government convinced the media to change the way they covered the suicides to tone it down.  When the coverage was muted, there were fewer copycats.

Another trigger was pop culture.  When a famous person commits suicide, there is a jump in people of similar demographics (age, gender, race) who commit suicide.  Again, the death of the famous person doesn’t cause the suicide, but it triggers it.  The Marilyn Monroe suicide was used as an illustration.  But Curt Kobain’s death didn’t trigger copycats.  They think it is because his wife, Courtney Love, immediately got on the media and told people how wrong this was and how suicide is not the solution.  She countered the trigger.  

Interesting findings I think.  Even though my expertise is not related to suicide, irrational thinking is similar across the board.  This says a lot that can be used in human factors too.

The Internet changes how we remember

Lots of recent research findings have serious implications for how we remember information when we have the Internet (i.e. Google) at our fingertips.  Having a regular and reliable source of external artifacts gives us a crutch, essentially using this “transactive memory”  by remembering where something is rather than what it is.   The results of all of these studies basically find that if we know a permanent record of something will be kept externally (in a computer we can access either locally or on the Internet, or even in an expert person that we trust), we use fewer resources to store it in our own personal memory (our heads).  We just remember where to find it.

Some authors conclude that this makes our thinking more superficial because we don’t think about content, just location.  Other authors conclude that this makes thinking deeper because we don’t think about details so we can think about implications. This is a really important difference.  If one is right, the Internet is a good thing for learning and education.  If the other is right, we could be starting a downward spiral to a society like the Eloi in the Time Machine.

How far can you take simulations?

Now here is a very interesting case.  There is one family of a 9/11 victim that is still suing the government.  This is the family of a passenger in one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center.  The dispute that I want to talk about today is that the family has put a very large monetary value on the terror that this person must have felt in the few minutes after he realized that the plane was going to be flown into the Towers.  The jury needs to decide how long he would have known this, how much fear that would have created, and how much compensation this is worth.  In order to do that, the family asked the judge to allow them to create a simulation of those last few minutes to show the jury and let them experience it personally.  The judge agreed. 

Can a simulation like this work?  In human factors research, we try to create ecologically valid scenarios to test user interfaces all the time.  Sometimes it is important to understand the users’ emotion, like frustration or hurriedness.  But this legal case takes it up a whole order of magnitude.  I am not sure if the typical juror could really watch a simulation and imagine what the passenger felt like, let alone put a dollar value on it. 

What do you think?

Philosophy and the behavioral science of decision making

I was reading an article today that brought up a very interesting conundrum.  What should you do if the law, professional ethics, and/or your personal morals disagree?  Which one takes precedence?  The article concerned medical caregivers.  They focused on what to do when the decision based on your personal morals would benefit the patient but the decision based on your professional ethics would benefit the hospital.  Or if the decision based on professional ethics would benefit yourself, but the decision based on your personal morals would benefit the patient.  There are many different possible combinations.

One example is palliative care.  The law says that you can’t give patients drugs that don’t benefit their health.  The Hippocratic Oath says basically the same thing.  But what if the dose of morphine that would ease the patient’s pain would make their medical condition worse and hasten their death?  The law says you can’t do it, your morals might say that you should do it, and medical ethics are currently debating the subject and so are unclear.  The hospital might have a policy that is murky also, or may be designed to cover their legal butts. 

This is the kind of question I think I could sit with a handful of thoughtful friends around a table and debate for hours over a few bottles of wine or pots of cappuccino.  And enjoy every minute of it.

Overloaded Brains

Angelika Dimoka at Temple did some fascinating research on decision making using fMRI.  When people were overloaded, what happened was much more complicated than just their ability to make decisions was degraded.  What she found is that the part of the brain that is in charge of tough decisions just gives up and lets other parts of the brain make the decision.  And it is even worse than the rational brain letting the emotional brain decide.  To make good tough decisions, you need both the rational and emotional brains to participate.  Prior research has shown that when the emotional centers are damaged, people can’t make rational decisions either.  But in these fMRI studies, too much information made the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex, which is what allows the rational and emotional brains to collaborate, just turns itself off.  And it stops inhibiting the anxiety and frustration areas, so those run wild. 

A lot of other research, for example some work by Sheena Iyengar at Columbia and Ap Dijksterhuis from the Netherlands (I have blogged about his work before), shows that trying to use too much information in a decision makes it worse, not better.  We are much better off focusing on the few most important characteristics and ignore the others.  One reason for this is that we have a limited working memory and we can only focus on a few characteristics at one time so it may as well be the most important ones.  Another reason is that our brain has trouble assigning small importance values to attributes.  So if a less important attribute is considered in a decision, it is probably going to be overweighted and therefore degrade the decision.

So what does all this tell us?  When making important and tough decisions, you can spend as much time as you want collecting information and advice. But when it comes time to actually decide, shut off your email, your twitter, your TV, etc. and just cogitate for a little while.  It will do you (and your dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex) a lot of good.

Do vacations make you happy?

I blog a lot about happiness research, but this one I have some personal experience with.  A couple of recent research studies, summarized in today's Boston Globe, show a few interesting findings that many people probably instinctively realize, but are kind of stark when written as fact.

First, they found that ones happiness goes up just before vacation (in antipitation) but is often not higher when you get back (compared to someone who never went on vacation).  Basically, we need a vacation from our vacation.

It is even worse these days because people are so worried about the economy, their jobs, and the money they are spending that they don't even enjoy it while they are on vacation.

And then a third study found that family vacations are stressful in general, because, well, you know how families can be.  One guy actually pretended to go fishing every afternoon, drove a block to a nearby bar, and spent the afternoon there.  None of his family cared about fishing, so he never got a question he couldn't squeak out of. I gotta remember that one :-D.