ia play

I wrote in October about the announcement of Tanya Byron’s review into the impact of violent video games on children.

Mind Hacks were recently a good deal more generous than me about Tanya Byron heading up the review:

“Tanya Byron is great. She came to prominence as the resident psychologist on several UK TV parenting programmes but used evidence-based interventions, essentially demonstrating what a clinical psychologist would do if your child got referred for behaviour problems.

Most notably, she obviously knew her shit and is widely respected among clinical psychologists. Despite often being described as a ‘TV psychologist’ she remained working in the NHS at the coal face of clinical work.”

The report is out now and is mostly sensible and balanced which makes me feel like I was unnecessarily skeptical, for example the report says:

Just like in the offline world, no amount of effort to reduce potential risks to children will
eliminate those risks completely. We cannot make the internet completely safe. Because of
this, we must also build children’s resilience to the material to which they may be exposed
so that they have the confidence and skills to navigate these new media waters more
safely.

and

There are new risks presented in online gaming, many of which are similar to the potential
risks to children of other internet use. These games offer new opportunities for social
interaction between children and there are a number of potential benefits for children and
young people from playing video games, including cognitive and educational gains and
simply having fun. Interestingly the evidence to prove these benefits can be as contested
as the evidence of negative effects.

Full report: Safer Children in a Digital World

In his Comment is Free piece, Happy Talk, Mark Vernon takes Positive Psychology to task. Whilst it’s not clear if he is directly criticising the work of Martin Seligman he opens the article with

“This year marks the 10th anniversary of Martin Seligman coining the term “positive psychology”.

He goes on:

“Its recommendations do not rise above the commonplaces of “work less”, “stay fit”, “think positively”, and so on”

“The fundamental error of the science - and the reason why so many of its recommendations sound trivial or just confused - is the assumption that happiness is the same as positive emotion.”

“happiness is not about feeling good, it is about being good. ….Happiness is fundamentally a moral matter not a hedonistic one.”

Which makes it seem that Mark Vernon has never read Martin Seligman’s work. Seligman describes three routes to happiness:

• the Pleasant Life, consisting in having as many pleasures as possible
• the Good Life, which consists in knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more flow in life
• the Meaningful Life, which consists of using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are.

Seligman is always pretty clear about what he values

“The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There’s no shortcut to that. That’s what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it’s unlikely there’ll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it’s impossible that there’ll be a pharmacology of meaning. ” from Edge: A Talk with Martin Seligman

Vernon says he has read Authentic Happiness and in detail. This is much easier to believe if you read his more considered postings on his own blog. What he seems to object to most is the idea that anything in this space is measurable and therefore worthy of scientific study. That’s a much more interesting and less tabloid debate. Shame he didn’t stick to that point on Comment is Free.

I realised the other day I’ve never actually read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and that was undermining my ability to spot when senior management were systematically misusing the concept. So I got a copy from Swapshop - these are really not the sort of books you should ever have to spend money on.

I’ve been slightly resistent to reading it. At university David Gauntlett introduced us to Charles Mackay’s the Madness of Crowds during lectures about moral hysteria about media (and Victorian moral outrage at the bicycle, if I remember rightly). ‘Madness’ is not the easiest of reads but the stuff on tulip mania makes your jaw drop at times. It may have been my rosy memories of those lectures that made me irritated at Surowiecki’s concept.

Now Surowiecki isn’t rejecting that groups of people sometimes (frequently?) do intensely stupid things. He is more interested in describing the conditions under which a crowd can be surprisingly smart. The book should really be called ‘When Crowds are Wise’.

I haven’t finished it yet and don’t really feel like it would matter if I don’t. ‘Wisdom’ and other pop theory books are more tightly written than ‘Madness’ but the structure is repetitive and they outstay their welcome pretty quickly. Tellingly, most are expansions of magazine articles, expanded (or padded) with a series of anecdotes and a smattering of scientific studies that are briefly skimmed over. They make me crave depth. But maybe not as much depth as Mackay gives you!

Pop theory books are such easy targets, I shouldn’t really expend energy on them. Just read ValleyWag instead.

In Stumbling on Happiness Daniel Gilbert mentions more than once that his friends are frustrated by his continual identifying of problems without providing solutions. It is certainly true that this is not a self-help book but it may make you look askance at some of your most engrained truths about what you want from life.

Gilbert believes we are rubbish at predicting what will make us happy in the future. He blames:

• realism - the belief that things are in reality as there are in the mind. But our brains are fallible and rarely scientific; they take all sorts of short-cuts.
• presentism - the tendancy for current experience to influence one’s views of the past and the future. Our current feelings affect our view of the future (when we are full we can’t imagine being hungry) and the range of possibilities we can imagine is a narrow set ranging around the present.
• rationalization - the act of causing something to be or to seem reasonable. We view our actions more favourably than our inactions, we rationalize extreme pain more than annoyance (there must be a good reason for going through this!) and we are happier about situations we are committed to and can’t get out of.
• corrigibility - the capacity for being corrected, reformed or improved (or rather our lack of it). We don’t accept other people’s evidence about things they are doing right now because we are different.

The book contains a brutal and rather depressing graph that shows how parents’ happiness varies with the age of their children. That the lowest point comes with teenagers will surprise no-one but the fact that parents’ happiness only reaches pre-children heights once the kids have again flown the nest is really quite startling. For the most part we mis-judge how happy children make us but it is an error that evolution rewards .

The studies are only comparing happiness of parents over time and don’t compare with non-parents. I’d be interested to see if there was any research to back up the folk opinion that kids might mean sacrifices when they are at home but you’ll appreciate them when you are old (for both care and love they can provide and the sense of continuity/immortality).

More lovely stuff from the Edge Question…

Daniel Gilbert, of Stumbling on Happiness fame changed his mind about changing your mind

“people are generally happier with decisions when they can’t undo them. When subjects in our experiments were able to undo their decisions they tended to consider both the positive and negative features of the decisions they had made, but when they couldn’t undo their decisions they tended to concentrate on the good features and ignore the bad. As such, they were more satisfied when they made irrevocable than revocable decisions. Ironically, subjects did not realize this would happen and strongly preferred to have the opportunity to change their minds”

Jim Ramsey writes at A List Apart about designing for flow (challenge carefully balanced with your abilities) rather than ease of use. I was very excited to find someone applying Csikszentmihalyi’s theories to web design. And even more so to find Jim tackling the keep-it-simple/making-the-complex-clear debate:

“The goal should not necessarily be to create a simple site. The goal should be to create a site that feels painless to use no matter how complex it really is. But wait, you might be thinking, hasn’t there been a simplicity movement in web design over the last few years? Yes, but there’s a learning curve for any site that seeks to solve a complex problem. We shouldn’t confuse simplicity with a desire to avoid needless complexity.”

Blackbeltjones was also bemoaning the tendency to stick with ‘don’t make me think’ in design and set himself the goal to create services that ‘scamper between beautiful extremes‘ of designs to be glanced at and those to be pored over.

Ramsey’s four flow-based rules reminded me of one BBC team’s (unsuccessful) iPlayer pitch which began with the analogy of a remote control with the more advanced buttons hidden, concealed from everyday use. We have a tendancy never to build those advanced buttons because most of the users (and/or our target users) never use them but we have to remember that simplicity is only one reason that evangelists evangelise.

I’m studying psychology with the Open University at the moment. This is helping tie together random thoughts about designing websites for people to use, understanding creativity at work and organisational psychology.

The course I have started with is Y163 - Starting with psychology. It is a short course and very structured since it is an Openings course, intended for students unsure if undergraduate study is for them. So far I’ve avoided any full length OU courses as I’m a bit nervous about the time commitment (and sporadic outbursts of laziness). I might consider Exploring psychology next Autumn. Or perhaps Ethnography or Challenge of the Social Sciences in May.

You can get a taster of the OU’s psychology materials through OpenLearn:

I’ve put together this list of free course materials from Open University that might be useful to IAs. I’ve got a much bigger list of courses from MIT’s OpenCourseWare to sift through (more on that later).

Recently at work I received a survey request from a member of our HR team. She is studying for a further degree and was collecting data for her dissertation on organisational psychology.

At its heart the survey was evaluating what I though the values of the BBC were and how well this matched my own. Her hypothesis was that the closer the fit between my values and how I perceived the BBC’s values then the more likely I would be to be satisfied with my work and actively commited to it. I would be less likely to be intending to find a new job.

It was an interesting task given that the BBC has a clearly articulated set of values:

• Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.
• Audiences are at the heart of everything we do.
• We take pride in delivering quality and value for money.
• Creativity is the lifeblood of our organisation.
• We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best.
• We are one BBC: great things happen when we work together.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/purpose/

The values are on our diaries, our ID cards and displayed 10ft tall in the entrance to the Media Centre. When they were first announced years ago I was skeptical of their usefulness as they seemed to boil down to the staff being told to ‘be good’. Uncontroversial but hardly profound.

Reflecting on this now I realise that ‘be good’ has two meanings and they pretty much sum up how I see the BBC’s values: making high quality products and programmes whilst playing nicely.

We may fall short at times but the goals remain pretty appealing.

I read yesterday in London Lite that £14 million from the National Lottery has been awarded to two projects with the aim of making London a happier place.

Today in London Lite the letters page is full of outrage:

“why don’t they just make a big bonfire out of the notes? Same effect”

“what a stupid idea. Why do they think that wasting more and more money on things like this is a good idea. Londoners are miserable - no amount of cash will make them smile!”

“what a way to waste money. Throwing cash at this initiative is about as worthwhile as flushing it down the toilet. People aren’t suddenly going to be happy because someone shows them how to plant vegetables, it’s much deeper than that.”

I’m guessing that the last correspondent never saw Making Slough Happy or read any of psychologist Dr Richard Stevens’ research. One of the ten steps to happiness listed in the programme was “plant something and nurture it”.

The two schemes are Well London and Active 8 London, run by the Peabody Trust, a charitable housing association.

Well London projects include:

• schemes to make it easier to buy quality, cheap, local food
• cook and eat clubs to increase rates of healthy eating
• training local people with direct experience of mental ill health to deliver mental health awareness training
• using the arts and cultural activity to improve environments and provide accessible physical activities
• increasing physical activity levels through increasing the range of sports and active recreation activities available to the community

Active 8 London plans to set up:

• food days to broaden people’s understanding of nutrition
• gardening schemes to show high-rise residents how to grow their own vegetables
• a week of events and workshops that will address common mental health problems
• the Fifty-Five Alive Club that will lead social activities for older people
• a project that will provide exercise sessions and advice in women only environments
• Pukka Tukka, which is a project to encourage single men off takeaways and processed foods and show them how to make healthy, fresh meals on a budget

So you can see why the correspondents are so disgruntled. Projects to encourage us to eat better and exercise more, what a terrible waste of money. After all £14 million does seem like a lot of money.

Amongst the information to support Well London’s bid is the fact that “ten per cent of people over the age of 65 are malnourished and account for approximately half of the £7.3 billion per year that malnutrition costs the UK.” Which isn’t the sort of information that London Lite has room for.

£7.3 billion? Now, that is a lot of money.

I’ve been reading Happiness - Lessons from a new science which began like an economist’s version of Authentic Happiness. So far so familiar. But then Layard moved onto the role of TV in our current state of happiness. He takes at face value the research suggesting TV makes us more violent and more miserable and didn’t really acknowledge that there was any academic debate about this at all (see Moving Experiences and Everything Bad is Good For You for alternative academic and populist perspectives).

I might have been more interested in the arguments than TV makes us unhappy if Layard hadn’t so unquestionably accepted the doctrine that TV makes us violent. Watching rubbish TV certainly stops me doing stuff. Some of that stuff is the dull routine of washing up, tidying, and mucking out the animals but it also stops me writing, reading, and making. It wastes my time. Or rather it is how I waste my time.

But watching brilliant TV is no less virtuous than watching a good film, play or musical. The problem seems to be with watching TV as a routine activity rather than a carefully chosen programme and so the arguments seem warped.

In the hierarchy of sinful media it seems that video games are the worst, then television, and then cinema. Novels and theatre aren’t on the scale. No-one tutted when I was taken to the National by my English teacher to see the gore-fest that is Macbeth. And that was real 3-d people conducting very believable acts of violence a few feet away.

At a historical re-creation in my teens, I remember chatting to a mother of two young children. She had got rid of the TV when her children were born and had been pleased that the toddlers were growing up peaceful and happy. Recently she said, her husband had taken the children to a medieval re-enactment that had featured jousting. She sighed as her youngest son galloped past us, twig masquerading as joust, endeavouring to impale any convenient passer-by. The next time I saw them, the TV had been re-instated.

I’m going to persevere with Happiness, hopefully the economic sections will include more sophisticated positions than the Daily Mail-esque ‘TV as moral crisis’.