I DON'T WISH NOBODY TO HAVE A LIFE LIKE MINE by David Chura

by David Chura, author of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup(Beacon Press, 2011), Winner of the 2010 PASS Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency

Reynaldo is surprised that he’s made it to another birthday. With so many of his friends killed by the streets, each new year startles him. But he’s not surprised to be locked up again. He’s spent every birthday since he was twelve with kids just like him—“punks,” “gangstas,” other children of disappointment. This time he’s been thrown into the harshest world of all, adult lockup.

Reynaldo is only one of the young people readers meet in I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup. This behind-the-scenes look at kids in prison, an environment that the Verna Institute of Justice describes as “unsafe, unhealthy, unproductive, inhumane,” is a collection of sharply drawn portraits of minors serving time in an adult penitentiary.

The young men and women I met during my ten years of teaching high school in a New York county adult facility were some of the most vulnerable teens I had encountered in forty years of working with at-risk kids in psych hospitals, drug rehabs, and alternative schools. With lives shaped by societal forces beyond their control—poverty, racism, physical and sexual abuse, violence, AIDS/HIV—they were often rejected by fragmented families, inadequate schools, and the communities in which they lived. Even the child welfare system, the very system charged with their care, abandoned them.

Although these young people are over- and misrepresented in the media as “superpredators,” their personal stories are underrepresented in academic literature. I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine helps fill that gap and is an excellent addition to coursework in sociology, psychology, and related scholarly studies. It goes beyond the sound bites and stereotypes that define the public’s perceptions of youthful offenders. At the same time, it brings academic theories to life and puts a face to the statistics on which many child welfare and juvenile justice policies and laws are based. Likewise, the book gives students a knowledge of cultures, lifestyles, and family dynamics that otherwise might not be readily available to them but is essential for their studies and their work in the social sciences.

When I share this book in various academic settings, students are quickly engaged by the young people’s stories . Because it is rooted in the day-to-day details of prison life and the real people entangled in that culture, students are able to move easily from the particular moments depicted in these kids’ lives to the broader social issues of poverty, family, the streets, peer pressure, and the juvenile and criminal justice systems that have such a profound effect on those lives. After reading and discussing I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine, students come away with not only a deeper understanding of sociological concepts and principles but also a greater respect for the vulnerability and resilience of these teenagers who refuse to be beaten down.

David Chura has worked with at-risk teenagers for forty years. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and multiple literary journals and anthologies, and he is a frequent lecturer and advisor on incarcer­ated youth. Visit his website Kids in the System.

CARROTS AND STICKS by Ian Ayres

by Ian Ayres, author of Carrots and Sticks: Unlock the Power of Incentives to Get Things Done (Bantam, 2010)

Rob Harrison is one of the most beloved teachers at Yale Law School. He has improved the writing and emotional outlook of generations of our students.  He is the kind of guy who unabashedly ends his emails “Love, Rob.” He is staggeringly kind. So it came as a bit of a shock when Rob told me that he had used unforgiving commitment contracts to help students overcome writer’s block. For more than a decade, students have given him checks of up to $10,000, signed and made out to charity, and authorized Rob to mail the checks if they failed to turn in a paper to the course professor by a specified date.

To date, his check-holding commitments have never failed. Rob has never had to mail one of these commitment checks. This is a spectacular result—particularly because Rob only offers the contracts to students who are hard-core procrastinators, kids who have already demonstrated a deep psychological inability of putting pen to paper (or nowadays, finger to keyboard).

I wrote Carrots and Sticks in part to understand why Rob has been so successful. The idea of incentives and commitments has been around forever. But the simplistic economic idea that you’ll get more of something if you dangle a larger carrot or less of something else if you brandish a larger stick misses a lot of what motivates people. For example, what’s really interesting about Rob’s intervention is the charities that the students chose to potentially fund. For the first five years that Rob provided his check service, the procrastinators made the checks payable to charities that they liked. But about five years ago, a student suggested that making the checks out to charities they didn’t like would be an even more effective incentive.

The idea of anti-charities has become a popular option on a commitment company that I founded, www.stickK.com, where people have put more than $3,000,000 at risk to stick to all kinds of commitments—including getting their school papers in on time. Users who put money at risk can decide who will get any money that is forfeited on their contract. Our 43rd president is a uniter in retirement. Currently the George W. Bush Presidential library is our most popular anti-charity.

Carrots and Sticks tells the stories behind dozens of randomized trials testing the wellsprings of human motivations. It exposes students to cutting edge studies in behavioral economics and psychology. The book shows that the new learning in motivation has a lot to say about how best to tailor commitments to make them more effective and virtually free. Students will learn why Zappos offers new employees $2,000 to quit, and how a New Zealand ad exec successfully sold his smoking habit. But this book is not an extended advertisement for stickK or for the value of commitment
contracts. It also explores not only how to pick the right commitment tool, but also when it’s best to keep the tool in the box.

Ian Ayres is an economist and lawyer who is the William K. Townsend Professor at Yale Law School and a professor at Yale’s School of Management. He is a columnist for Forbes magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Times Freakanomics blog. He served for seven years as the editor of the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, and in 2006 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has previously written ten books, including Super Crunchers, which was a New York Times business bestseller and named one the Best Economics and Business Books of the Year by The Economist. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

THE INVISIBLE GORILLA by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons

by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, authors of The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (Crown Archetype, 2010)

More than a decade ago, when we did the experiment that inspired the name of our book, we had no idea that it would become as well known as it has. For us, it was mostly a way for the students in a course we were teaching to work together on a research project on perception and awareness. We created several videos that showed two groups of three people passing basketballs around. The students showed one of these videos to subjects and asked them to count how many times the people wearing white passed the ball. While they were focusing their attention on this task, half of the subjects failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit who casually strolled into the scene, thumped her chest at the camera, and walked off the other side.

This study was inspired by earlier research by the pioneering cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser, who showed that people failed to notice when a woman carrying an open umbrella unexpectedly walked through the scene. In his videos, though, the actors were all partially transparent, and this fact enabled people to rationalize their failure to notice the umbrella woman—she was just hard to see. We went one step further and asked whether people could miss a fully visible unexpected event. We thought the answer would be no, so the results shocked us.

The gorilla video gradually gained notoriety, eventually earning us an Ig Nobel prize in psychology (awarded for achievements that “first make you laugh, and then make you think”). We started to realize that the video was popular because it gives people a deep and tangible insight into a surprising fact about how their own minds work. Normally, we literally don’t know what we are missing, but the gorilla video shows us that we must be missing a lot. It forces viewers to confront their own cognitive limitations and their assumptions about themselves.

Just as people believe, like we did, that unexpected events will capture our attention, they also believe that vivid memories are inherently accurate and that confidence is a good indicator of knowledge and skill. People readily infer cause when they shouldn’t, perceive patterns that don’t exist, and get taken in by claims for quick ways to boost brainpower. We call these mistaken ideas about the mind “everyday illusions.” The striking aspect of these intuitive misbeliefs is that our daily experiences rarely force us to confront them. The Invisible Gorilla couples our own research, and that of others, with entertaining real-world examples and personal stories that we hope will give readers a new way of looking at their own behavior and the world around them.

One of the challenges in teaching psychology is that all people are intuitive psychologists, but we don’t realize that our commonsense beliefs about the mind, brain, and behavior are often drastically wrong. When we start an introductory course in psychology or cognition with the gorilla video, it forces our students to confront the fact that their own minds don’t work the way they think. The video instantly shows that psychological science is more than just common sense, and it sets them on a path of trusting experiments over instinct and thinking more critically about accepted beliefs. We have peppered our book with similar examples and experiments that help bring home the often faulty assumptions we make about how the mind works, how we think, remember, decide, and reason. We hope that The Invisible Gorilla will make students more receptive to having their assumptions challenged, and that it will help teachers and students to think differently, in psychology courses and beyond.

Christopher Chabris, Ph.D. and Daniel Simons, Ph.D. are cognitive psychologists who have each received accolades for their research on a wide range of topics. Their “Gorillas in Our Midst” study reveals the dark side of our ability to pay attention and has quickly become one of the best-known experiments in all of psychology; it inspired a stage play and was even discussed by characters on C.S.I. Chabris, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard, is a psychology professor at Union College in New York. Simons, who received his Ph.D. from Cornell, is a psychology professor at the University of Illinois.

THE SEARCH FOR FULFILLMENT by Susan Krauss Whitbourne

by Susan Krauss Whitbourne, author of The Search for Fulfillment: Revolutionary New Research That Reveals the Secret to Long-term Happiness (Ballantine, 2010)

Read Whitbourne’s recent post, “Why We Love Betty White”, on Psychology Today.

It gives me great pleasure to tell you about my book, The Search for Fulfillment, which is the culmination of my life-long search for answers about what causes people to change in their adult years. As a young assistant professor, I dreamed of being able to chart the pathways of development by conducting a longitudinal study. Through a combination of good fortune and planning, and the willing cooperation of hundreds of participants, I was able to complete the study that forms the core of my book.

My goal in writing the book was to shed light on the myriad ways that people change through life while at the same time identifying systematic patterns to characterize that change. As one of the early pioneers in the pedagogy of adult development and aging, I also hope that my book will be a valuable supplement to college courses in the field. By giving students insight into the real changes that adults experience, the book will educate them about development in adulthood. The book also will illuminate the research process for students. My observations about the research participants form an important part of the book. The mystery and excitement that comes along with opening the questionnaires from participants tested 10, 20, and even 35 years earlier is captured in my personal reflections that accompany the stories of the people in my study.

As a scholar in this field, I have sought to educate readers about the importance of separating myths about midlife from the findings based on empirical data. The notion of a “midlife crisis,” long ago debunked as a myth by the scientific evidence on adult development, is one that I tackle head on in this book. I’ve showed why the myth persists but, more importantly, why it is a flawed notion. Along with the midlife crisis, popular psychology portrays adulthood as a series of discrete stages punctuated by decade marker points. In my book, I’ve shown that people develop in all kinds of ways in the years from late adolescence to midlife. I identify five pathways of development, providing numerous examples to illustrate each. I’ve also provided “Action Plans” that show specific ways people can find a more fulfilling pathway if the one they’re on isn’t working for them anymore.

The Search for Fulfillment also has an inspiring message, one with which my students strongly resonate: change is possible at any age. People can achieve their cherished goals no matter how old they are or what they’ve done with their lives so far. I provide examples both from the case studies in my book and the broader area of research on successful aging to show that people’s ability to achieve fulfillment is virtually unlimited. As an instructor of large psychology courses covering the range from the massive introductory level lecture to advanced seminars, I have developed an understanding of the best ways to engage students in the learning process. The Search for Fulfillment will educate them about this very important subject, captivate their imaginations, and inspire them to find their own fulfillment.

Click here to read an excerpt from the book.

Susan Krauss Whitbourne is a pioneer in the study of adult development and has been leading the field for more than thirty years. She received her doctorate in psychology from Columbia University and is currently a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Whitbourne has been interviewed and cited in numerous articles in publications including The New York Times, Newsweek, Redbook, and Glamour. A licensed psychologist, she lives with her husband in Amherst, Massachusetts.  

Visit the book’s website, which includes a number of interactive features, at: www.searchforfulfillment.com

MINDSET by Carol Dweck

In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, staff reporter David Glenn has written an interesting piece considering the pioneering work—and controversial viewpoints—of psychologist, professor and author Carol Dweck.  

Dweck, currently a professor at Stanford University, is a leading expert on motivation and personality psychology.  Having done more than twenty years of research on mindset, she has come to form what many consider to be a contratian view: by fostering the belief that intelligence is a fixed trait, and praising students for simply “being smart”, educators do a disservice not only to students but to society-at-large.

The article has sparked varied reactions among Chronicle readers.  In exchange for a free copy of Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, we’d like to get your point of view as well.  Simply read the Chronicle article and/or the book excerpt and post a thoughtful comment here.  Then email us for your free copy (please be sure to include your full school mailing address).

ECOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE by Daniel Goleman

by Daniel Goleman, author of  Ecological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy (Broadway Business, 2010), a book selected by Virginia Tech for its 2009 and 2010 Common Book Project.

Near the start of the 20th century William James wrote that “an education in attention would be the education par excellence.” That was then.

Today, a century after James, I argue that the most crucial education would be in ecological intelligence—and that this demands rethinking and updating curricula in ecoliteracy in fields ranging from physics and chemistry to business and psychology.

Let me explain what I mean by ‘ecological intelligence’.  For the 10,000 or so years of human history before the Industrial Revolution—what geologists call the Holocene Age—survival for the vast majority of people depended on each group’s keen understanding of the ecosystem it inhabited, whether the Kalahari or the Siberian tundra. Failure in this basic ecological knowledge meant death.

But with the rise of cities, of vigorous trade, and then the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the stuff we needed to survive—our clothes, our food, everything—more and more often came to us from a distance rather than being provided by the natural abundance of our locale. With that disconnect between survival and the need to understand our local ecosystem came a steady de-skilling in ecological intelligence. While native peoples who live on their land still may have exhibit levels of such savvy, the vast majority of us haven’t a clue about how our activities impact local, distant, and worldwide ecosystems.

The Holocene was an ecologically stable age, with conditions favorable for human flourishing. Geologists tell us we have entered the Anthropocene Age, a period in Earth’s history where human activities are altering for the worse the most basic biogeochemical process.

Today we understandably focus on the threats posed by global warming and how to slow it. Yet temperature represents but one of ten tipping points in the planet’s carrying capacity for life as we know it.  An article by Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Environmental Institute and seven colleagues in earth sciences in Nature describes these planetary boundaries, each with a safe threshold for human activities—and a point which, if crossed, triggers what may be catastrophic consequences for key biophysical systems that keep Earth in a desirable state for life as we know it.

We may have crossed three such boundaries already—not just global warming, but also loss of biodiversity (due, for example, to clear-cutting rain forests), and interference with nitrogen and phosphorous cycles (mostly due to nitrogen-based fertilizers).  The others include freshwater availability, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, and so on.

Those now in their school years will bear the brunt of these changes to a far greater extent than any other human generation. This makes ecological intelligence, with its deep understanding of the interconnections between human activity and its impacts on nature an essential human competence once again. 

And yet the human perceptual system was honed to spot dangers like a snarling predator, while today’s threats are too subtle, too slow, or on too macro a scale to register. Luckily, a new scientific discipline, industrial ecology, has emerged in the last decade or two that provides the necessary knowledge base. Industrial ecologists—physicists and chemists, industrial designers and engineers, ecologists and earth scientists—analyze with precise methods the impacts of human systems on natural ones.

Their main method is Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), which can render a metric for the full spectrum of environmental, health, and social impacts of a manmade object or activity. The LCA of the glass jar your pasta sauce comes in would break its life cycle into close to 2,000 discrete steps along the way, each one of which can be assessed for a spectrum of impacts, such as several hundred emissions of particulates and chemicals into air, water and soil; greenhouse impacts, embodied energy, the toll taken on the health of workers from exposure to toxic chemicals at each point in its supply chain, and so on.

LCA data can answer questions like, Is it better for the planet to use a stainless steel water bottle, or get water in plastic bottles? The answer: at first the cumulative negative ecological impacts of stainless steel far outweigh the plastic option—largely because of the energy and global warming impacts of making steel by heating pig iron and a mix of other ingredients to thousands of degrees for two days. But the more plastic bottles you don’t use because of the stainless, the more the eco-math tips in favor of the stainless.  By the time you reach 30 plastic bottles not consumed, all the global warming impacts of the steel are remediated; by 500 such uses, everything favors the steel.

Similarly, Is it better to use an e-reader or read the actual book? Answer: if you’re going to get the e-reader, you’ve got to read at least one hundred books before your ecological debt gets paid.

Another version of the question: Which shampoo has the fewest chemicals of concern—possible toxins? The answer to that can be found at www.DeepSkin.org, which analyzes the long list of ingredients in personal care products to find how many of them have shown up in medical databases as toxins.

Such computations represent what today’s ecological intelligence requires of us: surfacing the hidden impacts of everything we do and buy, so that we can make better choices. The new methodology makes possible an eco-rating system that could let a shopper instantly compare competing products on their ecological merits. A prototype of just such a system is already in operation. The website (and free iPhone app) www.GoodGuide.com  evaluates tens of thousands of consumer goods by aggregating more than 200 databases quantifying everything from the company’s global warming impacts to toxic chemicals used or treatment of workers.

Students today would benefit immensely from understanding how their individual shopping decisions impact global ecosystems. Such eco-rating systems exemplify a coming wave of radical transparency that could culminate in products’ competing not just on price and quality, but on their total ecological impact as assessed in life-cycle-assessment ratings. Historically there has always been a vast information asymmetry, with consumers knowing next to nothing about the true ecological impacts of what they buy. Ecological transparency hands that once-hidden information to shoppers.

The information systems fostering marketplace ecological transparency are disruptive technologies, promising to be a game-changer both for business and for environmental, public health, and social activists of many stripes. One scenario: As the cost of compiling and indexing this previously hidden information drops to zero, the ratings will sway the shopping decisions of substantial numbers of consumers—as well as business-to-business and institutional buyers—shifting market share toward ecologically superior products, thus making winners of brands that compete best on the ecological merits, along with price and quality.

This, in turn, could trigger a virtuous cycle where this crucial information at the point-of-purchase impels companies to upgrade the impacts of their business practices in an ongoing process of improvement. And this game change for business could resolve the longstanding debate within companies about sustainability, where some voices argue for social responsibility and others counter that there is just no business case to justify changing. While there are exceptional, progressive companies, the best most businesses have done is to pursue sustainability only to the extent it immediately helps their bottom line—for example, by finding cost savings from energy efficiencies.

These developments create a new opportunity for educators in a wide range of fields to help their students enhance their understanding of ecological intelligence. Each discipline has its unique window for engaging the issue.  Business and economics can address what it will mean for ecological impacts to take a central role in the value equation for business decisions.  Psychology and the social sciences can explore how this might alter our decision-making and behavior. Biological and health sciences can engage how industrial chemicals widely dispersed in the environment impact human health (and that of other species). 

The physical sciences can introduce their students to industrial ecology through the new methodologies for ecological impact assessment. And environmental science could investigate more precisely how manmade systems are impacting natural ones. Material sciences and industrial design can find a business case for exploring alternative industrial processes and platforms that harmonize with nature (perhaps based on biomimicry) rather than destroy it.

The emergence of ecoliteracy 2.0 can be seen in web-based assignments like the one for a course on Sparking Social Change at Harvard’s JFK School of Government:

Go to www.GoodGuide.com and look up a product that you regularly use. Can you envision this tool, or one like it, altering your purchasing decisions? Why or why not?

At Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, in a course on Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility, the assignment was to act as a consultant advising a CEO on what the company would need to do to get a high GoodGuide score for their products.  A geoscience course at Oregon State University had students look at GoodGuide to see what made a product “safe, healthy, and green.” And in an economics course at Northern Arizona State University the assignment was to get comparative product examples from GoodGuide to show how better information in the marketplace could move production to become more sustainable.

Each field brings a complementary lens to the burning question for our students’ future: how human activity, driven by our personal choices, accelerates the deteriorations of the Anthropocene Age—and how more ecologically intelligence decisions could slow them down.

The one hopeful indicator from that Nature article about the earth’s ten tipping points was ozone: once-perilous levels of the gases that were destroying the ozone layer have been reversed by wise decisions. Our collective ecological intelligence holds the key to our planetary future, for better or for worse. What could be a more important topic than that?

Daniel Goleman, PH.D. is also the author of the worldwide bestseller Working with Emotional Intelligence and is co-author of Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence, written with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee.

Dr. Goleman received his Ph.D. from Harvard and reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for twelve years, where he was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He was awarded the American Psychological Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award and is currently a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science His other books include Destructive Emotions, The Meditative Mind, The Creative Spirit, and Vital Lies, Simple Truths.

SWITCH by Chip & Dan Heath

Brothers Chip Heath, professor of Organizational Behaviour at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and Dan Heath, a consultant to the Aspen Institute, have followed up their bestselling and course-adopted book Made to Stick with a groundbreaking book that addresses one of the greatest challenges of our personal and professional lives—how to change things when change is hard.

In Switch, the Heaths have written a thoroughly engaging narrative about the difficulty in bringing about genuine, lasting change—in ourselves and in others—especially when we have few resources and no title or authority.  The Wall Street Journal recently published an interesting review that discusses the book’s message within the context of one reviewer’s personal life challenge, and in a recent video review social and new media  maven Chris Brogan called the book ”a must read”.

Check out their reviews by clicking on the links above, and start reading the book here; then post a comment: what do you think of the authors’ message?  Do you see applications in the classroom, among faculty/administration, or within your larger discipline?  Can we really flip the switch?