Social Commentary Exhibit A: The Unsociability of Indian Society

[Back from hiatus]

I made friends with more Europeans and Americans last year than with Indians – in Mysore! I have (had) always believed that the cultural differences between peoples are only superficial, and to a large extent I still do, but meeting foreigners who visit Mysore and having face-to-face conversations with them vividly contrasted the behaviors of my own people against theirs and helped me realize how I took some ideas to be universal that aren’t necessarily so. Disillusionment was kicking in, and there’s not another feeling that feels better.

As an Indian, you might be able to relate to many socially awkward situations I can describe, but perhaps none more tellingly than the awkwardness of meeting new people without being introduced and standing there in silence, starting conversations with strangers, or just generally acknowledging the presence of a stranger in the room. We have a hard time smiling at people we see on a regular basis during the morning walk or the guy at the grocery store. Avoiding participating in a conversation between strangers next to us seems a better option than joining it. In short, we are an unbelievably unsociable* people – and we let it disappear into the monotonous landscape of life in India.

But a foreigner visiting India, to whom this unsociable behavior is as foreign as the exotic birds of India, would be understandably puzzled. Taking a historical, and later contemporary, perspective on this, I quote here a renowned 18^th Century explorer, Carsten Niebuhr, a very perceptive traveler, who visited India and made these observations in Travels through Arabia and other countries in the East (1792) [keep in mind that ‘s’ back then was written elongated and almost made to look like an ‘f’]:

That observation, by the way, still rings true in some parts of India. Some smug “upper class” gits continue to delude themselves into believing they are inherently “upper” than the rest of enlightened India. I don’t want to go on too much of a tangent, but a shit-for-brains, rabies-infected doctor of pseudoscience (Ayurveda) had this to say at the 102^nd Indian Science Congress conference, an event that has come under a lot of heat for allowing these revisionist tumors to present their talks at a science conference.

"...Sushruta is asking for credit to be known worldwide as the father of surgery". He argued that sophisticated techniques, such as corrective nose surgery, and the use of scalpels so sharp that they could "split hair", were lost because of the subsequent dominance of "certain religions". Also, he argued, "Buddhism's advocacy of non-violence gained such precedence that even the use of scalpels were considered to be violent and over time, surgery started to be practiced by 'lower classes' and they lost their refinement."

Anyway, getting back to the crux of the issue, Niebuhr’s observations may not be true for the majority of educated India today, but it does seem that our culture's demonstrable unsociability has strong roots in a centuries-old caste system where people were precluded from socializing or fraternizing with members of other castes. As time passed and civil rights movements were brought to bear, these social edifices were demolished to an extent, but the psychological grip they had on the masses wouldn’t disappear. They were too subtle, and too embedded, to be noticed; it’s like a fish asking “what the hell is water?” – the title of a famed commencement speech by David Foster Wallace.

Niebuhr also observed that Indians were very unsociable towards foreigners as well. This I myself witnessed at two different places in Mysore in the last six months. A European woman walked into a sweet store I was at, and the two employees (both male) left in charge of the store, who were serving me at that moment, prolonged serving me as long as they could so they could avoid making eye contact with the European or talking to her, and at one point I heard them murmuring and coaxing each other to take that woman’s order – until she got tired of waiting and asked if they would serve her or not (politely). Another quick incident was at my gym locker room where an American visiting professor of considerable age said hello to the locker room boy, and the boy just stared back at him with a solemn, blank face, not smiling or saying hello in return. Apparently, smiling at strangers is the most intolerable social sin you can commit in the rusting, crumbling relic of a plague called caste system whose trail in the sand people still wish to track.

This entire experience has convinced me to stay abroad, preferably in a less rigid and more sociable European/American nation, for a few years so I can contrast the default behavior patterns we take for granted in India against a different, possibly better way of living and learning. Better later than never, better late than later. But best sooner.

*Unsocial and anti-social are worlds apart. One can be unsocial without being anti-social.

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Less > More: A fresh perspective

There has been a new discovery in psychology, a finding that is dominant enough to affect all our lives and almost all aspects of our lives. About a year ago, psychology researcher Norbert Schwarz and his team conducted a study into the inner workings of the minds of two people during a specific type of a conversation – where one is trying to impress the other and expect something in return, like a job or their money, and the other is listening to everything that is being put on the table and making up a decision whether to give them what they expect. The results of the study surprised even the researchers enough that they categorized its generality as a paradox and called it ‘The Presenter’s Paradox.’

The idea is simply this: Whenever you are on the presenter’s end of submitting a list of your accomplishments, you mention all of your accomplishments, regardless of how big or small they are, instinctively assuming that the person you are presenting them to is adding them all up. The person on the receiver's end, though, hears a completely different story. They don’t add you accomplishments, they instinctively average them out. If you scored a 750 on GMAT (say 10 points for this), organized a college festival in the capacity of a student president (say 10 points again), served as the editor-in-chief of the college magazine (10 points), and then also mention that you came second in a cooking competition (2 points), your hope is that your score adds up to 32 as it has in your head; when in reality, from the perspective of the judge, you only scored an average of 8, as opposed to scoring an average 10 had you not mentioned the cooking competition bit at all (not 10+10+10+2=32, but 32/4=8). In short, quality, not quantity.

This phenomenon of adding-versus-averaging has caused quite a sensation in psychology fields in the past year since its publication. Follow-up studies – a total of seven – have found the same behavior exhibited in a variety of different circles. In one study, customers were asked to price an ipod without any freebies and another identical ipod that came with a free song. On average, they were willing to pay $242 for the one without the free song and $177 for the one with the free song. This seems counterintuitive. Why would anyone pay more for less? (Here's another neat example of this same phenomenon). In a second study with different participants, they reversed the scenario and asked them to guess which one a customer was more likely to buy, and 92% of them said the one with the free song would sell more. Our reasoning dramatically transforms when we are presenters and receivers, and it turns out that this reasoning takes place completely differently in our subconscious mind than our conscious.

I had written a blogpost a year ago about the brain having evolved to conserve every last bit of neuron in order to save brain space, because it only has a limited amount of gray matter to work with for a million of its callings. It only allocates the absolutely-necessary number of neurons to any task and not a neuron more – it’s frugal but it gets the job done like a pro. Averaging is a much better way of conserving brain space than summation. In the above example, 8 is a much simpler number than 32 – not just in terms of the number of digits but also in terms of how it is arrived at. In the case of summation, the brain begins with the first number, adds it to the second, adds this new number to the third...and with each iteration the number gets not only bigger but more importantly much different than the previous summation. However, in the case of average, the brain only has to vaguely average out the first two numbers, and from the third number onwards the average will be much closer to the average of the first two and not vary significantly – and any significant variation in new items added will immediately tell you whether the average has gone up or down with just a glance at the numbers without having to do the math. You instinctively know that the average of three 9s and two 8s is higher than the average of three 9s and two 8s and a 3, without even knowing what that average is. You know, instinctively, that the average of the whole set has gone down with the addition of a number that is significantly less than the average of the first five; and if this newly added number is not significantly less than the average of the first five, you again know instinctively that the average hasn’t changed much – a very simple but effective tool in decision-making that consumes much less brain power than having to individually add up each number and remember the new summation each time. This logic applies whether you are dealing with 4 items or 10, although the study hasn’t been conducted for very large number of items so I don’t wish to speculate there.

The brain has evolved over millions of years to do this kind of averaging without associating concrete numbers to anything. It comes naturally to us – provided we are at the receiver’s end.

This finding has significant impact on how you should conduct yourself, be you an interviewee (presenter) or be you designing a product for sale (presenter), be you gifting many gifts on someone's birthday (presenter) or be you accepting punishment (receiver). Yes, it even applies to how you perceive punishment, which was one of those 7 studies. Participants of the study were asked to choose between two punishments for littering: a) $750 fine, or b) $750 fine plus two hours of community service. Paradoxically, 86% of the participants chose option B because they reasoned that it was less severe than option A – which is ridiculously, obviously not true. Not only that, but they also reasoned that option B was significantly less severe than option A. The Presenter’s Paradox had come into play, (this time being not the presenter but the receiver) and their brains averaged out the overall punishment, because not many perceive community service as a severe form of punishment in comparison with a $750 fine, so the overall perception of the severity of punishment diminished.

As a general rule, in any situation where you are either presenting, or are being presented, multiple items with the expectation of an impeding decision of approval or selection, stop and ask yourself which side of the fence you are on (presenter or receiver) and:

1. Remove items that reduce the overall quality of your presentation if you are the presenter, or
2. Add, don’t average, all the items if you are the receiver.

Now then, since I have the habit of relating everything I read or observe to filmmaking/filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick had noticed, or at least had an inkling of, this phenomenon back in the 70s, as is visible in this quote:

“It is not so important to make a good film as it is to not make a bad one.” - Kubrick

He knew that if he made a bad film, his good films will not come for his rescue and his overall reputation would suffer. He ended up making only 11 feature films in his entire career. Had Sydney Lumet made only 11 good ones, instead of the 50 eclectic feature films he did make, he too would’ve been revered alongside Kubrick, not an inch lower. The saying “less is more” isn’t all bullshit.

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Writing impulses surface

So...I've been pretending to be busy for many a month now and nothing good has come out of it. Meanwhile, I've been suppressing my psychotic writing fits and avoiding thinking about any topic for more than 15 minutes. But, as it so often happens when you suppress urges, they manage to manifest as other behavioral aberrations: I've killed three hookers in the last month alone, and lost count of it before that.

And to spare those presumably innocent lives, I'll try and write something in a free-flow form, without much deliberate thinking.

As you've probably guessed, that part about killing hookers is rank bullshit. But I enjoy talking about bullshit, I enjoy seeing people bullshit, I enjoy psychoanalysing bullshit. Bullshit surrounds us as thickly and imperceptibly as the air we breathe. I don't mean bullshit in terms of lies, rather, as just idiotic shit we are better off being ignorant of. And one of those is the way people get you to open up, to spill the beans on something by guising themselves as pseudoacademic experts citing their own personal expertise. Now, to be fair, we are all psychologists. We all try to understand how people's minds work, and in doing so, understand our own. Having an understanding of the nature and attitude of people you interact with, and people in general, gives you an edge on manipulating them. But when the line between that understanding and the pretense of understanding begins to blur, you will end up shitting in the minds and lives of those you are attempting to manipulate.

Now, I feel an obligation to be specific. Remember, when you are down and out after life has completely fucked you over (we all have those moments, right?), a friend always very comfortingly tells you "talking helps, I'm here, you can share it with me"? That's bullshit. No, actually, it isn't total bullshit, because talking does help, but:
1. It comes with constraints.
2. The friend could:
a) Be genuinely trying to comfort you by letting you share your sorrow with them, or
b) Just be curious about your plight and is attempting to get you to open up. Morbid curiosity is part of us.

About the constraints: Talking about your situation or misfortune with someone helps only when the talking is done immediately post the misfortune, and the talking window is open only for a brief time period. I read about this in a Martin Seligman (a very respected, important and real psychologist, also the former President of American Psychological Association, elected by the widest margin in all the history of the association) book, so I'll get right down to the source:

Another widely believed theory, now become dogma, that also imprisons people in an embittered past is the hydraulics of emotion. This one was perpetrated by Freud and insinuated itself, without much serious questioning, into popular culture and academia alike. Emotional hydraulics is, in fact, the very meaning of "psychodynamics". Emotions are seen as forces inside a system closed by an impermeable membrane, like a balloon. If you do not allow yourself to express an emotion, it will squeeze its way out at some other point, usually as an undesirable symptom.

In the field of depression, dramatic falsification came by way of horrible example. Aaron Beck's invention of cognitive therapy, now the most widespread and effective talk therapy for depression, emerged from his disenchantment with the premise of emotional hydraulics. The crucial experience for Tim came in the late 1950s. He had completed his Freudian training and was assigned to do group therapy with depressives. Psychodynamics held that you could cure depression by getting them to open up about the past, and to ventilate cathartically about all the wounds and losses that they had suffered.

Tim found that there was no problem getting depressed people to re-air past wrongs and to dwell on them at length. The problem was that they often unraveled as they ventilated, and Tim could not find ways to ravel them up again. Occasionally this led to suicide attempts, some fatal. [...]

Anger is another domain in which the concept of emotional hydraulics was critically examined. America is a ventilationist society. We deem it honest, just, and even healthy to express our anger. So we shout, we protest, and we litigate. [...] If we don't express our rage, it will come out elsewhere - even more destructively, as in cardiac disease. But this theory turns out to be false; in fact, the reverse is true. Dwelling on trespass and the expression of anger produces more cardiac disease and more anger.

[...]

I want to suggest another way of looking at emotion that is more compatible with the evidence. Emotions, in my view, are indeed encapsulated by a membrane - but it is highly permeable and its name is "adaptation," as we saw in the last chapter. Remarkably, the evidence shows that when positive and negative events happen, there is a temporary burst of mood in the right direction. But usually over a short time, mood settles back into its set range. This tells us that emotions, left to themselves, will dissipate. Their energy seeps out through the membrane, and by "emotional osmosis" the person returns in time to his or her baseline condition. Expressed and dwelt upon, though, emotions multiply and imprison you in a vicious cycle of dealing fruitlessly with past wrongs.

The summed up point is, when shit happens, express it healthily to people close to you who you trust, express it soon after the incident and be done with it - that is of course assuming that you want to express it at all. If you wish to keep it a secret and not share it with anyone, freely abandon any fear that it'll outwardly manifest in other ways. As Seligman says, and he knows what he is saying, left to its own devices all those negative feelings will dissipate over time and will turn into nothing more than a faint memory of a bad incident. But dwelling over it, recollecting it to some curious bystander who is pretending to comfort you by claiming it'll make you feel good to talk about it or "blow out the steam" even long after the incident, is only going to make things from good to bad and bad to worse.

As I write all this, there's an avalanche of thoughts pouring into my mind over this topic, one particularly important (about the dangers and perils of reading psychology books by self-supposed "pop" psychology authors who do not have a formal training in psychology). And another important topic, a sort of online experiment if you will, I wanna cover about how easily we can be influenced by a cluster of similar opinions, but it's too much to write and I'll save it for another time.

So for now, over and out, goodnight!

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