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The Ethics of Manipulinks

image of computer screen covered in pup-up ads

Let’s say you go onto a website to find the perfect new item for your Dolly Parton-themed home office. A pop-up appears asking you to sign up for the website’s newsletter to get informed about all your decorating needs. You go to click out of the pop-up, only to find that the decline text reads “No, I hate good décor.”

What you’ve just encountered is called a manipulink, and it’s designed to drive engagement by making the user feel bad for doing certain actions. Manipulinks can undermine user trust and are often part of other dark patterns that try to trick users into doing something that they wouldn’t otherwise want to do.

While these practices can undermine user trust and hurt brand loyalty over time, the ethical problems of manipulinks go beyond making the user feel bad and hurting the company’s bottom line.

The core problem is that the user is being manipulated in a way that is morally suspect. But is all user manipulation bad? And what are the core ethical problems that manipulinks raise?

To answer these questions, I will draw on Marcia Baron’s view of manipulation, which lays out different kinds of manipulation and identifies when manipulation is morally problematic. Not all manipulation is bad, but when manipulation goes wrong, it can reflect “either a failure to view others as rational beings, or an impatience over the nuisance of having to treat them as rational – and as equals.”

On Baron’s view, there are roughly three types of manipulation.

Type 1 involves lying to or otherwise deceiving the person being manipulated. The manipulator will often try to hide the fact that they are lying. For example, a website might try to conceal the fact that, by purchasing an item and failing to remove a discount, the user is also signing up for a subscription service that will cost them more over time.

Type 2 manipulation tries to pressure the person being manipulated into doing what the manipulator wants, often transparently. This kind of manipulation could be achieved by providing an incentive that is hard to resist, threatening to do something like ending a friendship, inducing guilt trips or other emotional reactions, or wearing others down through complaining or other means.

Our initial example seems to be an instance of this kind, as the decline text is meant to make the user feel guilty or uncomfortable with clicking the link, even though that emotion isn’t warranted. If the same website or app were to have continual pop-ups that required the user to click out of them until they subscribed or paid money to the website, that could also count as a kind of pressuring or an attempt to wear the user down (I’m looking at you, Candy Crush).

Type 3 manipulation involves trying to get the person to reconceptualize something by emphasizing certain things and de-emphasizing others to serve the manipulator’s ends. This kind of manipulation wants the person being manipulated to see something in a different light.

For example, the manipulink text that reads “No, I hate good décor” tries to get the user to see their action of declining the newsletter as an action that declines good taste as well. Or, a website might mess with text size, so that the sale price is emphasized and the shipping cost is deemphasized to get the user to think about what a deal they are getting. As both examples show, the different types of manipulation can intersect with each other—the first a mix of Types 2 and 3, the second a mix of Types 1 and 3.

These different kinds of manipulation do not have to be intentional. Sometimes user manipulation may just be a product of bad design, perhaps because there were unintentional consequences of a design that was supposed to accomplish another function or perhaps because someone configured a page incorrectly.

But often these strategies of manipulation occur across different aspects of a platform in a concerted effort to get users to do what the manipulator wants. In the worst cases, the users are being used.

In these worst-case scenarios, the problem seems to be exactly as Baron describes, as the users are not treated as rational beings with the ability to make informed choices but instead as fodder for increased metrics, whether that be increased sales, clicks, loyalty program signups, or otherwise. We can contrast this with a more ethical model that places the user’s needs and autonomy first and then constructs a platform that will best serve those needs. Instead of tricking or pressuring the user to increase brand metrics, designers will try to meet user needs first, which if done well, will naturally drive engagement.

What is interesting about this user-first approach is that it does not necessarily reduce to considerations of autonomy.

A user’s interests and needs can’t be collapsed into the ability to make any choices on the platform that they want without interference. Sometimes it might be good to manipulate the user for their own good.

For example, a website might prompt a user to think twice before posting something mean to prevent widespread bullying. Even though this pop-up inhibits the user’s initial choice and nudges them to do something different, it is intended to act in the best interest of both the user posting and the other users who might encounter that post. This tactic seems to fall into the third type of manipulation, or getting the person to reconceptualize, and it is a good example of manipulation that helps the user and appears to be morally good.

Of course, paternalism in the interest of the user can go too far in removing user choice, but limited manipulation that helps the user to make the decisions that they will ultimately be happy with seems to be a good thing. One way that companies can avoid problematic paternalism is by involving users at different stages of the design process to ensure that user needs are being met. What is important here is to treat users as co-deliberators in the process of developing platforms to best meet user needs, taking all users into account.

If the user finds that they are being carefully thought about and considered in a way that takes their interests into account, they will return that goodwill in kind. This is not just good business practice; it is good ethical practice.

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‘The Rehearsal’, Manipulation and Spontaneity

photograph of film set

The recent HBO series, The Rehearsal rests on a common concern – having to navigate situations without experience, where mistakes can significantly alter your life and the lives of those around you. Spearheaded by writer, director, producer, and performer, Nathan Fielder, the program offers people an opportunity to “rehearse” potentially high stakes situations by repeatedly running through a simulation with the actors. The episodes to air so far involve a bar trivia fanatic confessing to a friend that he previously lied about having a master’s degree, a woman practicing raising a child before deciding to become a mother, and a man hoping to convince his brother to let him access an inheritance left by their grandfather.

The show derives its humor, in part, from the lengths Fielder and his crew go to in the “rehearsals.” In the first episode, his team build a fully furnished, patroned and staffed, 1-to-1 replica of the bar in which the confession will take place, complete with live trivia. Fielder hires an actor to play the part of the confessor’s friend, who then arranges a meeting with this friend to better understand her personality, speech, and mannerisms in addition to gathering information about her from a blog she runs.

To simulate motherhood, the team hires many child actors to act as the adopted son. However, labor laws prevent a child actor from working more than four hours in a single day and limit the days a child can work each week. So, Fielder and his team must regularly replace the actor playing the child but do so covertly to maintain the illusion of raising a single child. Additionally, the team of actors changes each week, to a group of older actors, so the woman experiences raising a child at each stage of development.

Why go to such lengths, aside from the entertainment value? In the first episode of the series, Fielder notes that in our regular lives whether we achieve happy outcomes is a matter of chance. The idea behind taking painstaking efforts to make the “rehearsal” look and feel like reality is to leave the participants as prepared as possible in order to reduce the role fortune plays.

The appeal of performing these “rehearsals” seems to be motivated by a desire to control our interactions with others, in order to produce the best outcomes for all involved.

This is an incredibly common desire. Feeling like things are out of your control, especially those things which have a significant impact on the course of your life and the lives of those you care about, is anxiety inducing. The fact that things may go horribly wrong for us, despite our best efforts and intentions, creates a feeling of powerlessness. Being wrecked with anxiety and marred with feelings of powerlessness makes life difficult, to put it plainly.

But ought we follow through on this desire to gain control over our interactions with others? Richard Gibson helpfully analyzes the desire for control in the context of gene drives here. In doing so, Gibson presents an argument from Michael Sandel. Sandel argues that our desires for control, particularly in the realm of genes, involves a lack of humility. When we try to control as much as we can, this implies that we think it is appropriate for us to control these things. Specifically, Sandel claims that when we view the world in this way we lose sight of what he calls life’s giftedness. Our talents, skills, and abilities are given to us in the same way that a friend might give us a present. Much like one would think it inappropriate to alter a friend’s gift, perhaps trying to take total control of our lives is similarly inappropriate.

However, the real moral issues behind our desires for control become clear only when we consider that “rehearsing” involves other people.

For instance, the bar trivia fanatic is not just aiming to limit the fallout he experiences as a result from his confession. Instead, he is afraid of how his friend will react, and thus tries to control her reaction.

Of course, one might see no problem here. After all, we regularly tailor our interactions with others to avoid offending them while getting what we want. This is simply part of life.

Yet “rehearsed” interactions seem importantly different. To see why, consider the following: Daniel Susser, Beate Roessler, and Helen Nissebaum, in a discussion of manipulative practices on digital platforms, describe manipulation as “imposing a hidden or covert influence on another person’s decision-making.” Manipulative practices, they argue, involve trying to control a person in the same way that one might control a puppet, producing the desired behavior in the target by pulling on the target’s proverbial strings. Further, they argue that manipulative practices are more problematic the more targeted they are – manipulation that is tailor-made to match one person’s psychological profile seems more troubling than manipulation that trades on a widespread cognitive bias. Compare an ad for beer on TV the week before the Super Bowl that shows people excitedly watching a football game, to the same ad appearing in the social media feeds of sports fans after they make posts which suggest that they are feeling sad.

Although not perfectly analogous, there are important similarities between manipulation and “rehearsal.” We can see this with the trivia fanatic. In some cases, the “rehearsal” must be covert; if the fanatic’s friend knew he spent hours “rehearsing” their conversation, this would surely undermine his efforts and likely cause great offense.

A “rehearsal” may involve efforts to control how others respond to the conversation. One practices pulling different strings during the conversation to see how that changes the final outcome.

Finally, some “rehearsals” are targeted; the actor in the fanatic scenario puts in significant effort to mimic the friend as closely as possible. Surely, the actor cannot perfectly capture the psychological profile of the target. Nonetheless, imperfect execution does not seem wholly relevant. Thus, at least some “rehearsals” appear morally problematic for the same reason manipulation is worrisome.

Yet other “rehearsals” may lack these features. The rehearsal of parenthood, while hilarious due to its absurdity, does not need to be covert, involve an effort to guarantee particular outcomes, nor target a specific individual. One’s child will certainly have a different psychological profile than the child actor and, no matter how skilled the actors, surely they will not have indistinguishable performances. Thus, “rehearsals” that aim to try out a particular role, like parenthood, seem to have a different moral character than those that aim to make another person act in a desired way.

There is, however, one thing which may be universally problematic about “rehearsals.” During “rehearsals” of a conversation, Fielder stands by, taking notes and turning the conversation into an elaborate decision tree. This seems to turn the conversation into a sort of game – one practices it, determines cause and effect relationships between particular conversational choices and interlocutor responses, then pushes the proverbial reset button if the conversation takes an undesired turn.

As a result, it seems that the ultimate goal of a “rehearsal” is to eliminate spontaneity in the real conversation.

But part of what makes our experiences with others worthwhile is when the unexpected occurs. The price we pay for spontaneity is the anxiety of uncertainty. Our desires for control, if satisfied, may leave our interactions with others feeling impoverished and hollow.

I cannot say with perfect certainty what the goals of The Rehearsal are. The show offers a hilarious but often uncomfortable glimpse into what people are willing to do to gain a feeling of control. In doing so, it offers us the opportunity to reflect on what we should aim to take out of our interactions with others, and whether gaining control is worth what we might lose. If this was Fielder’s purpose with The Rehearsal, then it is a rousing success.

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Interrogating the Sunk Cost Fallacy

photograph of cruise ship sinking

It’s Saturday afternoon. You are lazing on the couch, thinking about your evening. You had planned to attend a concert, but you’re feeling tired. You realize that you would, on the whole, have a much better evening if you stayed home. So, you decide to skip the concert.

I think we can all agree that this would be reasonable. But let’s add a detail. You already purchased a concert ticket for $400, which you can’t recoup. Should you go to the concert, after all?

Regardless of what you should do, many of us would go to the concert, in full knowledge that staying in would be time better spent, because we have already paid for the ticket.

This is an example of what’s often called the ‘sunk cost fallacy.’

Here’s another example. Your family has booked an expensive vacation to Yosemite with the intention of having a fun, relaxing vacation. Unfortunately, though, Yosemite is on fire. You know that if you take the vacation as planned, you will be forced to stay indoors on account of the smoke and will experience virtually no fun or relaxation. Yet the money you spent on booking can’t be recouped. The only other option is a staycation, which would be low-grade fun and relaxing.

A family that decides to go on vacation simply because they have already invested resources into that vacation honors sunk costs.

Psychologists tell us that humans regularly honor sunk costs. That this tendency is irrational is often considered axiomatic and taught as such. For example, the textbook Psychology in Economics and Business proclaims:

Economic theory implies that historical costs are irrelevant for present decision making and only [present and future] costs and benefits should be taken into account. In everyday life, however, this implication of economic theory is frequently neglected thus forming another instance of irrational behavior.

The underlying idea is something like the following. The rational actor aims to promote the best possible outcome. This requires him to attend to the potential consequences of his actions. But sunk costs are by definition unrecoverable. So, the rational actor shouldn’t take them into account in deciding what to do. Someone who foregoes better outcomes simply because he has incurred costs that are irretrievably lost irrationally leaves goods on the table for nothing in return. He compounds, rather than recoups, his losses.

This seems reasonable enough. But things are not quite as simple as they seem.

First, the claim that “historical costs are irrelevant for present decision making” can easily be misunderstood.

Sometimes actors should attend to sunk costs because those costs constitute evidence bearing on the likelihood of future success.

A firm that has invested extensive resources into a fruitless project would be foolish to ignore those investments when deliberating about whether to continue dedicating resources to the project, since the sunk costs may constitute good evidence that future investments will also be fruitless.

Moreover, sometimes what looks from the outside like honoring sunk costs is really something else. Suppose you know that if you choose not to go to the concert, you will inevitably feel bad about wasting money. In this case, it might be perfectly rational for you to attend the concert in order to avoid this feeling. Or suppose you know that skipping the vacation will cause family conflict to bubble up down the line. Again, it might be all-things-considered best to go to Yosemite despite the smoke. True, the underlying dispositions may be irrational. But individuals can’t always control their emotions, and families can’t always control their dynamics. A rational actor must act within the constraints that apply to him. To those who are unaware of those constraints, a rational action can look irrational.

All this can perhaps be acknowledged by the defender of sunk cost orthodoxy. However, several philosophers have argued that this orthodoxy is mistaken.

One reason for being suspicious is that the tendency to honor sunk costs can be leveraged in useful ways. The philosopher Robert Nozick has argued that it can be utilized to counteract the tendency to act against one’s considered judgment about what one should do. Suppose that on Friday you think that you should go to the concert on Saturday because it will be educational, but you anticipate that once Saturday afternoon rolls around you will have trouble mustering the motivation to get off the couch. If you know that you have a tendency to honor sunk costs, then you can, on Friday, increase the likelihood that on Saturday you will do what you think you should do by purchasing the ticket in advance. Similarly, the tendency to honor sunk costs can be utilized to convince others that you will do something. You might be able to convince an incredulous friend that you will attend the concert by showing them that you have already purchased a ticket; if your friend knows that you tend to honor sunk costs, this will give them good reason to believe that you will attend the concert.

There’s more. The doctrine that present actions can’t touch past events, which is implicit in the sunk cost orthodoxy, is not entirely true.

While it’s true that present actions can’t have a causal impact on past events, present actions can change the meaning of past events in ways that matter to us. And as Thomas Kelly has argued, this can make it reasonable to attend to sunk costs.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina provides an illustrative example. Anna leaves her husband and beloved child to start a new life with her sybaritic lover, Vronsky. The new relationship fails terribly. In a famous discussion, British philosopher Bernard Williams points out that this failure seems to retroactively tarnish Anna’s decision by showing it to have been unjustified. In contrast, had her relationship flourished, this would have vindicated the cost she incurred. The intuition that success or failure can retroactively vindicate or tarnish a costly choice is not uncommon in human life. It’s not hard to imagine that Anna would have preferred that the cost she paid to start her new life with Vronsky not turn out to have been fruitless. And if she were to have such a preference, this would give her reason to take the fact that she paid this cost into consideration when deliberating about, say, whether to try to salvage her relationship with Vronsky. Thus, sometimes it seems to make rational sense to honor sunk costs.

Then there is the issue of moral sunk costs. Suppose you are a general in charge of deciding whether to authorize a mission to rescue two hostages. You know that the rescue mission will very probably succeed but also cost the life of one soldier. Let’s assume that you are morally justified in sacrificing up to one life to save the two hostages. You authorize the mission. Unluckily, the mission is unsuccessful, and a soldier dies. Then another opportunity arises. You can authorize a second rescue mission, which you know is guaranteed to succeed but will cost the life of another soldier. The question is this:

Is it morally acceptable to authorize this second mission, given that one soldier has already died and we stipulated that you are only justified in sacrificing up to one life to save the hostages?

In other words, should we honor moral sunk costs?

Ethicists disagree on this issue. Some think that assessments of moral costs and benefits should be prospective, ignoring sunk costs. On this view, you should authorize the second mission. Others argue that there’s an overall limit to the moral costs that can be justifiably incurred to achieve a worthwhile objective, meaning that moral sunk costs should be taken into account. On this view, you shouldn’t authorize the mission. Still others adopt an intermediate approach. The point, for our purposes, is that the answer to this question is non-trivial. To treat one answer as axiomatic is a mistake.

All this is to say that authoritative pronouncements decrying the tendency to honor sunk costs as clearly irrational are misleading at best. It’s not at all obvious that “[a] rational decision maker is interested only in the future consequences of current investments,” as the esteemed economist Daniel Kahneman put it. There are cases, like the original concert example, perhaps, where this is true. And it may always be irrational to choose an outcome merely because one has incurred sunk costs. But in many cases, it seems to make perfect sense to account for sunk costs in deliberation. We just need to be reflective about how and why we do so.

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Treating Psychopathy?

photograph of 1896 sketch of the brain and it's parts

Most of us are familiar with the idea of the psychopath – emotionally vacant, devoid of empathy, and possessing poor behavioral control. Despite psychopathy not being a recognized mental condition in its own right (or at least, not in that exact terminology), as personality disorders go, it is almost undoubtedly archetypal. Many of the names we attach to the idea of evil certainly qualify for the label, including Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, and David Berkowitz. Beyond the real world, the psychopath is also a staple of fiction, with some of the most heartless villains being written with the disorder in mind, including Hannibal Lecter, Annie Wilkes, Patrick Bateman, and Norman Bates.

However, despite these colorful examples, not all psychopaths stalk the night looking for victims. Most real-life psychopaths navigate the world without making the headlines for slaughtering the innocent or starting nationwide manhunts. For every John Wayne Gacy, there are countless more who, while being manipulative and callous, get through their lives without turning their neighbors into a rug. Indeed, estimates place the prevalence of severe psychopathy in the general population at around 1%. That means, statistically speaking, you probably know a psychopath. And while this is the general prevalence, some groups of society appear to have more psychopaths than others, such as those in corporate leadership positions (≈12%) and prisons (≈20-30%).

Several studies examining the brains of psychopaths have found that they appear to have abnormal neurological structures and functionality. Specifically, the areas of the brain associated with empathy are underdeveloped and lack an average level of responsiveness to external stimuli. Some suggest that this is evidence of a neurological basis for psychopathy and that the abnormal brain structure is why psychopaths behave in the way they do. Following this, others argue that, if possible, we might be justified in using medical techniques and technologies, such as neurosurgery, to alter the brains of criminally violent psychopaths, thereby removing the psychopathy and instilling a level of empathy previously absent.

But can medical techniques reducing or eliminating psychopathic tendencies be justified, or are we medicalizing a group of people out of existence to satisfy societal desire?

We often think that medical interventions, be they as minor as a course of antibiotics or as radical as brain surgery, should only occur when said intervention benefits that person. This requirement is one of the central components separating treatment from research; the former benefits the individual while the latter benefits society (and maybe the individual). While there are exceptions to this rule of thumb – living organ donation, for example – the idea that medical treatment must have some individual benefit is both widely accepted and intuitively appealing. For instance, it would be unjustifiable for a surgeon to operate on you if that operation knowingly provided no beneficial outcome. The idea of an intimate link between a medical treatment’s justification and its potential for a positive result is one of the central pillars underlying one of the most influential theories in medical ethics – principlism.

As conceptualized by philosophers Thomas L Beauchamp and James F. Childress, and formulated in their book Principles of Biomedical Ethics (now in its 8th edition), beneficence is one of the four fundamental concerns when it comes to the ethical permissibility of medical interventions; the others being autonomy, non-maleficence, and justice. According to Beauchamp and Childress, each principle is equally important when looking for ‘reflective equilibrium’ (a coherence between the principles). However, here we’ll focus on beneficence, and specifically positive beneficence, which requires persons to provide benefits wherever possible.

So, would treating psychopathy have a beneficial effect on the psychopath?

This question can be broken down into two parts: (i) do psychopaths suffer as a direct result of their psychopathy?; and (ii) do psychopaths suffer as an indirect result of their psychopathy?

Whether psychopaths suffer as a direct result of their psychopathy is, to a degree, disputed for several reasons.

First, it is unclear whether psychopathy is an illness or a disease. While we might think it causes people to act in less than desirable ways from a social standpoint, this is very different from claiming that psychopathy represents an impairment to health on behalf of the person with psychopathy. If the disorder is of a social (rather than medical) basis, then it would seem highly inappropriate to try and use medical techniques to remedy what is socially disvalued.

Second, even if we accept that psychopathy is predominately medical in nature, that doesn’t mean that its removal would provide a direct benefit. This is because the psychopath would need to experience relief from suffering in a subjective sense for such a direct benefit to occur. Much like how taking a painkiller can’t ease your suffering if you’re not in pain, psychopathy’s removal cannot provide the individual with relief if it didn’t cause suffering in the first place. From the evidence available, it’s not clear whether psychopathy does cause direct suffering. Unlike having a broken bone or terrifying delusions, there’s no clear casual line between psychopathy and suffering. Just because psychopathy is a disorder, doesn’t mean it is harmful.

However, psychopaths don’t exist in a vacuum. Like all of us, they’re situated in the world around them, alongside its complex social, economic, religious, educational, and legal systems. And psychopathy might cause suffering by separating the individual from those systems and, more generally, from society. For example, I suspect many of us would experience suffering if we went to prison for committing a crime. This type of suffering exists regardless of our personality, whether ordered or disordered, because prisons are subjectively unpleasant environments that frustrate our life plans. This is just as true for psychopaths as for everyone else; psychopaths generally don’t want to go to jail. So, by eliminating the root cause of psychopathy, we might be able to prevent psychopaths from being sentenced to prison and thus, help them avoid the indirect suffering they would otherwise experience.

This line of arguing applies beyond prisons, though. Without their psychopathic tendencies, those persons might be better equipped to engage with society, find meaningful connections with others, and empathize with the rest of humanity.

However, appeals to such indirect suffering avoidance are rarely effective for justifying medical treatments in other contexts, especially when the therapy offered has the potential to alter one of the foundations of a person’s personality. For example, we wouldn’t think that someone who lives on the street as a matter of personal preference should have their mental state altered because a result of their choice is the ostracization from society’s mainstay.

We might think their choice is odd, and we might try to convince them that they would be better off living another way of life. But this is very different from using their disordered lifestyle as a justification for a medical procedure based on the idea of harm prevention and reduction.

So what does this mean for our psychopaths? Other arguments might justify medical intervention. For example, it could be that removing psychopathy may restore that person’s autonomous decision-making (although psychopathy’s coercive potential is disputed). One might argue that, as psychopathy is so prevalent in prison populations, its elimination from that sector of society might reduce the pressure on valuable social resources (although this opens up a can of worms regarding the value of autonomy vs the interests of the state).

At the end of the day, if the availability of psychopathic-centric media is any indication, the question of how society handles psychopaths isn’t going away anytime soon, and neither are the psychopaths.

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No Fun and Games

image of retro "Level Up" screen

You may not have heard the term, but you’ve probably encountered gamification of one form or another several times today already.

‘Gamification’ refers to the process of embedding game-like elements into non-game contexts to increase motivation or make activities more interesting or gratifying. Game-like elements include attainable goals, rules dictating how the goal can be achieved, and feedback mechanisms that track progress.

For example, Duolingo is a program that gamifies the process of purposefully learning a language. Users are given language lessons and tested on their progress, just like students in a classroom. But these ordinary learning strategies are scaffolded by attainable goals, real-time feedback mechanisms (like points and progress bars), and rewards, making the experience of learning on Duolingo feel like a game. For instance, someone learning Spanish might be presented with the goal of identifying 10 consecutive clothing words, where their progress is tracked in real-time by a visible progress bar, and success is awarded with a colorful congratulation from a digital owl. Duolingo is motivating because it gives users concrete, achievable goals and allows users to track progress towards those goals in real time.

Gamification is not limited to learning programs. Thanks to advocates who tout the motivational power of games, increasingly large portions of our lives are becoming gamified, from online discourse to the workplace to dating.

As with most powerful tools, we should be mindful about how we allow gamification to infiltrate our lives. I will mention three potential downsides.

One issue is that particular gamification elements can function to directly undermine the original purpose of an activity. An example is the Snapstreak feature on Snapchat. Snapchat is a gamified application that enables users to share (often fun) photographs with friends. While gamification on Snapchat generally enhances the fun of the application, certain gamification elements, such as Snapstreaks, tend to do the opposite. Snapstreaks are visible records, accompanied by an emoji, of how many days in a row two users have exchanged photographs. Many users feel compelled to maintain Snapstreaks even when they don’t have any interesting content to share. To achieve this, users laboriously send meaningless content (e.g., a completely black photograph) to all those with whom they have existing Snapstreaks, day after day. The Snapstreak feature has, for users like this, transformed Snapchat into a chore. This benefits the company that owns Snapchat by increasing user engagement. But it undermines the fun.

Relatedly, sometimes an entire gamification structure threatens to erode the quality of an activity by changing the goals or values pursued in an activity. For example, some have argued that the gamification of discourse on Twitter undermines the quality of that discourse by altering people’s conversational aims. Healthy public discourse in a liberal society will include diverse interlocutors with diverse conversational aims such as pursuing truth, persuading others, and promoting empathy. This motivational diversity is good because it fosters diverse conversational approaches and content. (By analogy, think about the difference between, on the one hand, the conversation you might find at a party with people from many different backgrounds who have many different interests and, on the other hand, the one-dimensional conversation you might find at a party where everyone wants to talk about a job they all share). Yet Twitter and similar platforms turn discourse into something like a game, where the goal is to accumulate as many Likes, Followers, and Retweets as possible. As more people adopt this gamified aim as their primary conversational aim, the discursive community becomes increasingly motivationally homogeneous, and consequently the discourse becomes less dynamic. This is especially so given that getting Likes and so forth is a relatively simple conversational aim, which is often best achieved by making a contribution that immediately appeals to the lowest common denominator. Thus, gamifying discourse can reduce its quality. And more generally, gamification of an activity can undermine its value.

Third, some worry that gamification designed to improve our lives can sometimes actually inhibit our flourishing. Many gamification applications, such as Habitify and Nike Run Club, promise to help users develop new activities, habits, and skills. For example, Nike Run Club motivates users to become better runners. The application tracks users across various metrics such as distance and speed. Users can win virtual trophies, compete with other users, and so forth. These gamification mechanisms motivate users to develop new running habits. Plausibly, though, human flourishing is not just a matter of performing worthwhile activities. It also requires that one is motivated to perform those activities for the right sorts of reasons and that these activities are an expression of worthwhile character traits like perseverance. Applications like Nike Run Club invite users to think about worthwhile activities and good habits as a means of checking externally-imposed boxes. Yet intuitively this is a suboptimal motivation. Someone who wakes up before dawn to go on a run primarily because they reflectively endorse running as a worthwhile activity and have the willpower to act on their considered judgment is more closely approximating an ideal of human flourishing than someone who does the same thing primarily because they want to obtain a badge produced by the Nike marketing department. The underlying thought is that we should be intentional not just about what sort of life we want to live but also how we go about creating that life. The easiest way to develop an activity, habit, or skill is not always the best way if we want to live autonomously and excellently.

These are by no means the only worries about gamification, but they are sufficient to establish the point that gamification is not always and unequivocally good.

The upshot, I think, is that we should be thoughtful about when and how we allow our lives to be gamified in order to ensure that gamification serves rather than undermines our interests. When we encounter gamification, we might ask ourselves the following questions:

    1. Is getting caught up in these gamified aims consistent with the value or point of the relevant activity?
    2. Does getting caught up in this form of gamification change me in desirable or undesirable ways?

Let’s apply these questions to Tinder as a test case.

Tinder is a dating application that matches users who signal mutual interest in one another. Users create a profile that includes a picture and a short autobiographical blurb. Users are then presented with profiles of other users and have the option of either signaling interest (by swiping right) or lack thereof (by swiping left). Users who signal mutual interest have the opportunity to chat directly through the application.

Tinder invites users to think of the dating process as a game where the goals include evaluating others and accumulating as many matches (or right swipes) as possible. This is by design.

“We always saw Tinder, the interface, as a game,” Tinder’s co-founder, Sean Read, said in a 2014 Time interview. “Nobody joins Tinder because they’re looking for something,” he explained. “They join because they want to have fun. It doesn’t even matter if you match because swiping is so fun.”

The tendency to think of dating as a game is not new (think about the term “scoring”). But Tinder changes the game since Tinder’s gamified goals can be achieved without meaningful human interaction. Does getting caught up in these aims undermine the activity of dating? Arguably it does, if the point of dating is to engage in meaningful human interaction of one kind or another. Does getting caught up in Tinder’s gamification change users in desirable or undesirable ways? Well, that depends on the user. But someone who is motivated to spend hours a day thumbing through superficial dating profiles is probably not in this respect approximating an ideal of human flourishing. Yet this is a tendency that Tinder encourages.

There is a real worry that when we ask the above questions (and others like them), we will discover that many gamification systems that appear to benefit us actually work against our interests. This is why it pays to be mindful about how gamification is applied.

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Aesop and the Unvaccinated: On Messaging and Rationality

cartoon image of scorpion on frogs back

Aesop shared a fable once about a scorpion and a frog. The scorpion asked a frog to ferry him across a pond. The frog was reluctant because he feared the scorpion’s sting. But the scorpion appealed to the frog’s intellect and pointed out that if he did sting the frog, the scorpion would surely drown as well. So, the frog agreed to the request. But, as expected, about halfway across the pond, the frog felt an awful pain and before they both died, asked the scorpion why. The scorpion replied that he really couldn’t help it saying, “it’s in my nature to sting.”

Why did the frog make that irrational decision, even though he knew better? Fables typically have a moral for us to learn, and this one is no different; make rational decisions. Unfortunately, we make irrational decisions all of the time, even if, in the animal kingdom, we are known as the rational ones.

As of this writing, about 50% of the U.S. population is vaccinated. Since it is estimated that between 70% and 90 % of the population will need to be vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus to reach herd immunity, we have a long way to go. But the vaccination rate overall has slowed significantly. We watched the vaccination rate begin to plateau in late June and early July, at about the same time that the more deadly Delta variant began to ravage the unvaccinated. Now, with new cases rising each day across the country, one wonders why anyone would put off getting the vaccine.

Explanations for this phenomenon abound; some believe that vaccine hesitancy is to blame. Early on in the rollout of the three major vaccines available in the U.S., many were “hesitant” because they wanted more information about the vaccines. Were the vaccines safe? If so, like most medications, they probably were not safe for everyone, so for whom were the vaccines not safe? Where would people go to get the vaccines? What costs would be involved? These are rational questions the population was asking; they may have been gathering facts to make rational decisions. Or were they?

Humans aren’t really known for our ability to be consistent when it comes to making rational decisions. Some of those same people get flu shots every fall and make sure their children receive needed vaccinations as infants and again prior to the start of school, still don’t want to take the COVID vaccine. All despite the fact approximately 99% of deaths in America due to COVID are found among those unvaccinated. It seems irrational not to avail oneself of this life-saving intervention.

Even some government officials — in those areas where the vaccination rate is low, and the spread of the variant is high — are growing more outspoken about their constituents’ health decisions. Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), has reiterated in public that for those who can be vaccinated to do so. (His state, Kentucky, has a lower-than-average vaccination rate.) The Governor of Alabama, Kay Ivy, recently said that this is now an epidemic of the unvaccinated in her state, further stating that you just can’t teach “common sense.”

But alongside these pleas are plenty of name-calling, finger-pointing, and blaming — all of which may be smokescreens for the fact that we don’t really know how to message the vaccine’s appeal to remaining holdouts. We continue to assume that humans are consistent in making rational choices, and when we believe they have not done so, we have a tendency to throw up our hands. We think that stupid decisions are made by stupid people. The truth, however, is that we aren’t consistent in making rational choices; irrationality abounds, and it has nothing to do with stupid. The same people who buy lottery tickets also buy insurance. Why? Cognitive science and the felicific calculus of Jeremy Bentham may both give us a peek into why we make decisions as we do, whether they are rational ones or not.

In the 18th century, Bentham formulated the “felicific calculus” which stated that an event can be assigned a value (typically numeric) as to its utility or worth. That worth was measured in terms of the amount of happiness or pleasure the event would bring people; the more happiness, the better the decision that caused it, and the more rational it would be seen. This mathematical algorithm measured pleasure or pain in terms of several facets; among them were the pleasure or pain’s intensity, its duration, the probability of its occurrence (and reoccurrence), and the number of people affected. While being mathematically sound, philosophically appealing in many ways, and rational, for most day-to-day decisions the calculus was impractical. Adapting a thought experiment originally posed by cognitive scientist/mathematician Amos Tversky however, may help us understand from a cognitive perspective why people are so inconsistent when making decisions.

Example 1. Let’s say that your local health department has projected that 600 people will get the Delta variant of COVID-19 in your hometown of 6,000 people.

There is a proposed treatment, A, and if applied it will save 200 people. 

There is another proposed treatment, B, and if applied, there will be 1 chance in 3 that 600 people will be saved, and 2 chances in 3, that no one will be saved.

Which treatment would you choose?

When presented with the original problem, most people chose treatment A where there is a surety that 200 people will live.

Example 2. Now, let’s say that the health department again predicts that 600 people in your hometown of 6,000 will get the Delta variant of COVID-19.

There are 2 treatments, A and B.

If treatment A is applied, 400 people will die.

If treatment B is applied there are 2 chances in 3 that all 600 will be lost, and I chance in 3 that no one will be lost.

Which treatment would you choose?

When presented with the original problem, most people chose treatment B.

Notice, however, that 200 people survive in each case. Despite this, in case one, treatment A was chosen as the better alternative, while in case two, treatment B was chosen. Why, when the probabilities and outcomes are the same, did A get chosen one time and B the other time? It’s the way the cases are presented, or framed. In the first scenario, the probabilities are presented in terms of lives saved (gains), and in scenario two the probabilities are framed in terms of lives lost (losses). We focus on the number of lives saved in either case, whether it’s a “sure bet” or the better probability.

Currently, public messaging regarding vaccinations focuses on lives lost rather than the number of lives saved. If we reframe messaging to focus on lives saved (gains) instead of lives lost (losses), the application of Tversky’s thought experiment might get us over the hump and on our way to achieving herd immunity. The felicific calculus of Bentham applies as well; perhaps a mathematical algorithm makes more sense to us homo sapiens in this case. Think of the number of persons who would experience happiness and pleasure instead of pain over a long period of time, plus the freedom from worry that the Delta could re-infect us. Correctly framing the message seems to be one effective and scientific way to help people manage the inherent irrationality that comes with being human.

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Why Didn’t God Make Us Happier?

photograph of smiling gingerbread man relaxing in a cup of hot coacoa

Or if you’re an atheist: why didn’t evolution make us happier? There is insight to be gleaned from reflecting on the nature of happiness during a pandemic. There is no doubt that as a society, we haven’t been this unhappy, depressed, and stressed in decades. We may then wonder about the nature and value of happiness — presumably we could be happier, so then why aren’t we? And to be clear, by the term ‘happiness’ I’m referring to the affective state of happiness; the subjective happiness that you experience ‘from the inside.’ This should be clarified because Ancient Greek philosophers had a wider notion of happiness they called eudaimonia: the idea that subjective happiness is only part of human flourishing and well-being, along with things virtue, fulfilling work and relationships, and so forth.

Why think we could be happier? There is evidence from psychology that (subjective) happiness could be ratcheted up and down based on how underlying psychological processes are tweaked. The first is what psychologists call ‘optimism bias’: we have a positively distorted perspective of our lives in the past, present, and future. Sometimes I’m nostalgic for my time in high school, but then remember that those times weren’t that great. This optimism bias distorts what we remember, how we think about the future, and how we compare to our peers, toward the positive. And we find this bias across culture, sex, class, and so on — it seems baked into our biology.

Second, there is affective resilience: baseline affect (how things feel to us ‘from the inside’ across time) is mostly stable across time. We may think winning the lottery would raise our levels of happiness far into the future; but that isn’t so. People tend to return to their prior level of happiness within months; the same holds of the bad stuff too. As the philosopher, Dan Moller, points out:

“The results of empirical investigation thus seem to conflict with a widely held view in our culture that the loss of a partner or spouse is invariably or at least usually an agonizing blow with long-lasting and significant impact. Contrary to this folk view (and certain non-empirical bereavement theories), empirical research seems to show that most people manifest what the author above refers to as resilience in the face of loss: although they are initially traumatized, they quickly recover and manifest little long-term distress. And, again contrary to folk wisdom, this does not seem to be the result of repression or of having had an unfulfilling relationship; most people simply adapt far better to their loss than we tend to believe.”

This affective resilience, while it may dampen the positive, insulates us from the bad; it allows us to carry on in face of defeat, pain, loss, disappointment, and so forth. And with some tweaks to our psychology, we could be happier than we are. It would be hard then to see how we could ratchet up our optimism and affective resilience, we would be much happier. And if we could be happier than we are, then why aren’t we happier?

It could be that there isn’t a good explanation, but there may be a good reason: think about a world where everyone is extremely happy and content; in that world little would get done. Think about yourself when you’re happy and contented; those mental states are nice, but they can rob us of motivation to change, improve, and innovate — to give but a few examples. Pain and discontent can motivate personal growth, invention, and artistic expression. As the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, observed:

“The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modeled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being.”

There are insights here that illuminate the question we began with: discomfort is motivating, and too much happiness isn’t. Happiness is like knowledge and ignorance: it faces a goldilocks problem in that you don’t want too much or too little. To be too happy, in the subjective sense, would be to undercut the value of other aspects of the good life: creating art, cultivating virtue, inventing a technology, and growing in a relationship. We often think of unhappiness as a problem that needs addressing, but that misses the good of the right amount of discomfort and subjective unhappiness. And it puts pressure on us not to assign too much value to subjective happiness, and instead assign more value to a broader notion of happiness that better accords with the concept of eudaimonia — thinking about happiness in broader terms like flourishing.

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Waiting for a Coronavirus Vaccine? Watch Out for Self-Deception

photograph of happy smiley face on yellow sticky note surrounded by sad unhappy blue faces

In the last few months, as it is clear that the coronavirus won’t be disappearing anytime soon, there has been a lot of talking about vaccines. The U.S. has already started several trials, and both Canada and Europe have followed suit. The lack of a current vaccine has made even more evident how challenging it is to coexist with the current pandemic. Aside from the more extreme consequences that involve hospitalizations, families and couples have been separated for what is a dramatic amount of time, and some visas have been halted. Unemployment rates have hit record numbers with what will be predicted to be a slow recovery. Restaurants, for example, have recently reopened, yet it is unclear what their future will be when the patio season will soon come to an end. With this in mind, many (myself included) are hoping that a vaccine will come, the sooner the better.

But strong interest for a vaccine, raises the worry of how this influences what we believe, and in particular, how we examine evidence that doesn’t fit our hopes. The worry is that one might indulge in self-deception. What do I mean by this? Let me give you an example that clarifies what I have in mind.

Last week, I was talking to my best friend, who is a doctor and, as such, typically defers to experts. When my partner and I told my friend of our intention of getting married, she reacted enthusiastically. Unfortunately, the happiness of the moment was interrupted by the realization that, due to the current coronavirus pandemic, the wedding would need to take place after the distribution of a vaccine. Since then, my friend has repeatedly assured me that there will be a vaccine as early as October on the grounds that Donald Trump has guaranteed it will be the case. When I relayed to her information coming instead from Dr. Anthony Fauci, who instead believes the vaccine will be available only in 2021, my friend embarked in effortful mental gymnastics to justify (or better: rationalize) why Trump was actually right.

There is an expression commonly used in Italian called “mirror climbing.” Climbing a mirror is an obviously effortful activity and it is also bound to fail because the mirror’s slippery surface makes it easy to fall from. Italians use the expression metaphorically to denote the struggle of someone attempting to justify a proposition that by their own lights is not justifiable. My friend was certainly guilty of some mirror climbing and she is a clear example of someone who, driven by the strong desire to see her best friend getting married, self-deceives that the vaccine will be available in September. This is in fact how self-deception works. People don’t simply believe what they want for that is psychologically impossible. You couldn’t possibly make yourself believe that the moon was made of cheese, even if you wanted to. Beliefs are just not directly controllable like actions. Rather, it is our wishes, desires, interests that influence the way we come to believe what we want by shaping how we gather and interpret evidence. We might, for example, give more importance to reading news that align with our hopes and scroll past news titles that question what we would like to be true. We might give weight to a teaspoon of evidence coming from a source we wouldn’t normally trust, and instead give credibility to evidence coming from sources that we know is not relevant.

You might ask though, how is my friend’s behavior different from someone who is simply wrong instead of self-deceived? Holding a belief that it turns to be false usually happens out of mistake, and as a result, when people correct us, we don’t have problems revising that belief. Self-deception instead, doesn’t happen out of mere error, it is driven by a precise motivation — desires, hope, fears, worry, and so on — which biases the way we collect and interpret evidence in favor of that belief. Consider my friend again. She is a doctor, and as such she always trusts experts. Now, regardless of political views, Trump, contrary to Dr Fauci, is not an expert in medicine. Normally, my friend knows better than trusting someone who is not an expert, yet the only instance when she doesn’t, is one where there is a real interest at stake. This isn’t a coincidence; the belief there will be a vaccine in October is fueled by a precise hope. This is a problem because our beliefs should be guided by evidence, not wishes. Beliefs, so to speak, are not designed to make us feel better (contrary to desires, for example). They are supposed to match reality, and as such be a tool that we use to navigate our environment. Deceiving ourselves that something is the case when it’s not inevitably leads to disappointment because reality has a way to intrude our hopes and catch up with us.

Given this, what can we do to prevent being falling into the grips of self-deception? Be vigilant. We are often aware of our wishes and hopes (just like you are probably aware now that you’re hoping a vaccine will be released soon). Once we are aware of our motivational states, we should slow down our thoughts and be extra careful when considering evidence in favor. This is the first step in protecting ourselves from self-deception.

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Can Shoplifting Be Activism?

photograph of women shoplifting makeup

Our culture is both fascinated with and repelled by shoplifting. On the one hand, we scoff at the cast of archetypal shoplifters; the materialistic teenage girl, the shifty hoodie-wearing teenager, the bored housewife looking for a thrill. In whatever form they take, shoplifters are considered defectors from the American Dream, which loudly proclaims the value of honest backbreaking labor (though it doesn’t necessarily decry the obsession with material wealth that purportedly rewards such work). At the same time, theft is glamorized on the big screen. Movies like The Bling Ring, Ocean’s 8, and Hustlers plumb the moral implications of theft while wrapping it up in a glamour veneer.

Our cultural fascination has bled into a scientific quest to unmask the motivations of shoplifters. What kind of person would do something as seemingly irrational (in that it goes against the logic of working hard for material wealth) and potentially dangerous as shoplift, we want to know, and why? Women are generally thought to shoplift more than men, because women are thought to shop more in general, but a 2008 study conducted by The American Journal of Psychiatry demonstrated that men actually are more likely to shoplift than women. A recent paper, “The Psychology of Shoplifting: Development of a New Typology for Repeated Shoplifting,” which was published in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology in 2019, makes a more rigorous effort at pinning this elusive figure down.

The researchers conducted a survey of around two hundred self-professed kleptomaniacs, which measured their shoplifting behavior (the strategies they use to avoid detection and the objects they gravitate towards), the emotions they experienced before and after shoplifting, their mental health, level of impulsiveness, and history of trauma. From this data, the researchers determined that there are six kinds of shoplifters, each with a specific personality profile and motivation for theft. The most common type, making up around 25% of the participants, is the Lost-Reactive type, who are “characterized by generally law-abiding behavior, stability in mental health, and the preponderance of lifetime loss and trauma.” These types may be shoplifting out of a subconsciously desire to compensate for a past loss or trauma, the researchers suggest. The Impulsive type is generally financially well-off, and tends to steal only when the opportunity presents itself. They were found to feel the least shameful about their actions. The Depressed type shoplifts to alleviate the pain or numbness of mental illness, possessing both the highest amount of shame and the strongest moral compass of the six types. In a sharp contrast to that, the Hobbyist, views theft as not only a fun activity but a component of their identity. According to the study, “These individuals had a high orientation to traditional ethics and yet did not experience distress, guilt, or shame, indicating that they may see themselves as above, outside, or exempt from the law,” and also receive the highest enjoyment from stealing of the six types. The last two types, Addictive-Compulsive (the thrill-seekers) and the Economically Disadvantaged (those who steal to survive, and almost always stole on a more regular basis than any of the other types), tended to feel low shame.

But there is a seventh type of shoplifter, unmentioned in the study and yet present in the spaces between each profile. This type professes a unique motivation for shoplifting; political activism. The activist borrows elements from nearly all the categories, never fitting fully into any single group. They are hobbyists, in that they view stealing as fun and commiserate with other shoplifters in an online community, much in the same way that a hobbyist who builds miniature trains might do. Many claim to enjoy the thrill of the steal, but many more cite economic disadvantage as their key motivation. But the characteristic that most sharply distinguishes them from the other categories is that their shoplifting is rooted in feminist and anti-capitalist theory, which could perhaps point to a strong rather than weak ethical compass.

These political shoplifters are surprisingly visible online. Journalist Tasbeeh Herwees interviewed teenage girls who participated in “Liftblr,” an online community of shoplifters who swap tips and share pictures of their hauls on Tumblr. A study on the Liftblr community conducted by Northumbria University, identified a cluster of three themes that made up the entire body of shoplifting blogs; tips and advice (how to find the blind spots of security cameras, what kind of purses can hide items the most inconspicuously), resistance and activism (which includes social justice, feminist theory, and anticapitalist theory), and storytelling/community building (personal stories about shoplifting that reify a sense of a shared identity between members, as well as jokes about the Liftblr community and general humor related to shoplifting).

Not all members of Liftblr are explicitly political, but the Northumbria study found that social justice was a central focus on the blogs of of the most vocal members of the community. One girl, who went by the handle PrincessKlepto, wrote to Herwees that,

“Being a teen girl is hard—you have to be skinny, attractive, put together, well dressed, etc. Society teaches girls through media and the beauty industry that they need to be perfect. I’m sick of handing my money over to corporations that profit on this bullshit…so if i have to put up with this kind of stuff, i’m [sic] certainly not going to pay for it.”

Like the Lost-Reactive type, these teens cite trauma (the broad trauma of living in a capitalist society, the more specific trauma of being a teenage girl) as a motivation for theft, though the trauma described in the Lost-Reactive profile seems more of an unconscious than conscious motivator. Another lifter, pretty-little-lift, wrote, “I 100% support women stealing beauty products instead of throwing every spare penny she has away chasing after an impossible pipedream sold to her since the moment she was born.” Some users take it farther than just makeup. Tumblr user ptsdhamlet posted in 2016,

“I’m not going to get too deep into the Shoplifting Discourse but I will say that ‘stealing for survival’ encompasses a lot more than just food. You could be stealing makeup (which is already always absurdly expensive) so strangers read you as a woman, or stealing a toy so your kid doesn’t feel like she’s a bad person because Santa didn’t bring her anything, or stealing tampons or toilet paper because everybody deserves basic hygiene, or stealing nice clothes for a job interview, or stealing school supplies so you can study, or stealing any other number of things that are truly necessary but you won’t immediately die if you don’t get them.”

So is it possible for shoplifting to be activism, and if so, how effective a form of protest is it? In her 2012 book The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting, Rachel Shteir describes the work of journalist James Trimarco, who researches the subject of shoplifting as activism. His work isn’t focused on determining the moral implications of stealing, but the metric by which we should judge the validity of shoplifting as political activism. He asks, “Does [shoplifting] keep a sense of direct action alive? Does it develop skills that can come in handy in other forms of political work? Does it provide a kind of ‘euphoria of disobedience’ against private property that’s not easily found elsewhere?”

David Graeber, a cultural anthropologist who teaches at the London School of Economics, was also interviewed by Shteir for her book. He told her than when shoplifting,

“One doesn’t destroy (or steal) people’s personal property, in the sense of things they own to use themselves. One doesn’t deprive people of their means of livelihood. Almost all anarchists I know don’t feel it’s morally wrong to steal from a large corporate store, but wouldn’t think of stealing from a mom and pop grocer […] It’s really hard to imagine a scenario where we can overcome capitalism without breaking or taking anything that the law says doesn’t belong to us. So then it comes down to a question of tactics: When is it helpful and when isn’t it? […] Who gets to say? Is there some central authority that can dictate what are appropriate revolutionary tactics?”

Both Triamarco and Graeber bring up interesting points. Shoplifting is arguably the most accessible form of civil disobedience. As superstores proliferate, it becomes easier and easier to swipe items from big businesses. But when we consider whether or not it provides the euphoria of disobedience or develops the tools needed for protest, the issue becomes more complicated. As demonstrated in the 2019 study, shoplifters are still a heterogeneous group, whatever their professed motivations. They may not even consider their actions political at all. Furthermore, not everyone who shoplifts actively develops a revolutionary toolkit or participates in community-building, as the Impulsive type attests to.

There are few forms of protest that are as difficult to interpret as protest, that don’t explicitly make themselves known as civil disobedience. Shoplifting, uniquely, is inherently silent rather than overtly loud and disruptive. Does that mean it only becomes protest when we think of it as protest, and the action itself is inherently neutral? Or do such actions carry political significance regardless of intent? The Economically Disadvantaged shoplifter, for example, might not think about their actions as political, but one could argue that their need to shoplift arises from and is a direct response to political or economic marginalization, so the action is political whether or not they think of it that way or not.

At the same time, some researchers have argued that the act of shoplifting is inherently harmful, regardless of professed motivation. A 2008 study conducted on over 43,000 people demonstrated that those who shoplifted were more likely to be diagnosed with mental illness, and tended to score lower on social, mental, and emotional health surveys. The same study showed that high school students who admitted to shoplifted had lower grades, higher drug and alcohol use, and more feelings of sadness and hopelessness when compared with those who hadn’t shoplifted. However, one could argue that all of this data doesn’t necessarily reveal a cause and effect relationship. In other words, it doesn’t tell us if shoplifting is a cause or symptom of emotional and mental problems, and how factors like economic disadvantage shape these lived experiences. A much smaller 2012 study conducted on over 100 teenagers found that nearly 25% of those diagnosed with kleptomania reported attempting suicide at least once. 93% of those cases reported that the attempt was “directly or indirectly due to their kleptomania symptoms (e.g., shame over the behavior; legal or personal problems resulting from shoplifting).” This study comes much closer to establishing that link, but the sample size is relatively small, and once again, the study doesn’t address the social and economic forces at the root of many shoplifters’ trauma.

Thinkers like Graebar bring up the difficulty in labeling an act like shoplifting, which may spring from any number of motivations, as inherently anticapitalist or revolutionary. It’s worthwhile to reconsider the various forms civil disobedience can take, and what stereotypes about shoplifting impact our cultural response to it.

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The Resurgence of Tarot

Photograph of the Moon tarot card propped against a crystal with several other tarot cards arranged in the background

New Age religious practices are on the rise, from neo-paganism to astrology. In 2012, barely more than half of Americans characterized astrology as “unscientific.” Crystal healing and spiritual practices have also made a comeback as a means of individual meditation cobbled from ancient traditions.

Tarot is another practice enjoying a new cultural moment.  It is the inspiration for products sold by GOOP to Dior to Etsy. Tarot card apps abound, including the Golden Thread app which teaches the user the symbolism associated with each card. This fascination is not entirely new – it mirrors the New Age fascination of the 60s and 70s, famously exemplified by Salvator Dali in his Tarot series.

The history of Tarot cards history is somewhat murky. It is speculated that Tarot cards originated as a game akin to contemporary card games. Artist Bill Wolf suggests that the diverse imagery on the cards allowed for creative games where ”the random draw of the cards created a new, unique narrative each and every time the game was played, and the decisions players made influenced the unfolding of that narrative.”

One of the most famous editions of Tarot is the “Motherpeace” version, developed in the 1970s by feminist researchers Karen Vogel and Vicki Noble. The deck depicts feminine figures in ancient mythology and is influenced by the works of Alice Walker. Described by Alice Walker as a “mirror that constantly shows the truest face,” Motherpeace has remained in print since its debut. The appeal of Tarot to second-wave feminism is tied with its emphasis on women’s spirituality. It emphasizes intuition, meditation, and caring spiritual practices as an alternative to institutionalized religious practices that have frequently excluded women, LGTBQ individuals, and other “outsiders” from enjoying equal standing. Tarot similarly enjoys a strong following from the LGTBQ community and people of color.  

Why was Tarot such a recurrent symbol for reclaiming the power of marginalized individuals?  While tarot cards are represented in pop culture as the purview of professional psychics, cards are just as likely to be used by meditation groups, individuals, or friends musing over the twists of daily life over a cup of tea or a tumbler of wine. It is a quintessentially accessible practice that satisfies some need for symbolic representation that institutionalized religion formerly filled for many.

Some of these symbols are less vernacular today than at the time of their composition (hence the proliferation of new editions of the Tarot). The changing decks bear in common that they encourage the reader to see one’s life in more complex ways than one, linear narrative, prompting different possible lenses to one’s current situation. The user learns to develop layered interpretations of seemingly straightforward imagery. While the Death card is notorious in pop culture, its meaning is one of change and transformation rather than intimating literal demise.  

Far from being strictly a divination practice or predicting one’s future, tarot cards are understood as an “invitation to the present moment.”  

Can there be an ethics of Tarot? Taken as a hobby by individuals or among friends, it can be a game or a series of meditation props for evaluating different aspects of life in working through present concerns. The latter could be understood to be a similar practice to meditation, or reading self-help books, but with a randomized approach.  

Professional tarot card readers exist, however. If Tarot cards are essentially random meditative symbols, what sort of services does a paid reader provide?  

People seeking tarot card readers are often at a knotty intersection in their lives, torn about a decision, or stuck in a recurring cycle of behavior. Sometimes they are ravaged by grief or anxiety. In short, people tend to seek out Tarot readers for the same reasons they seek out therapists. But why choose a Tarot reader over a trained therapist? Tarot reader Thom suggests that one reason is economic: most people are not covered by insurance that would enable them to see a therapist for the long-term care that is required to be effective. Thus, Tarot responds to a serious gap in mental health services for many people. While clients pay Tarot readers out of pocket, meetings are often infrequent and reserved for times when the person feels particularly stuck on a question and needs a listening ear.  

Tarot readers typically offer an open and accepting environment and frequently embrace holistic approaches to responding to questions that incorporate the client’s worldview. The use of neutral symbols invites client participation and interpretation, allowing for a more equal power and epistemic dynamic than in a typical clinical situation. A recurring theme among codes of ethics by tarot readers encourages clients to use their own inner guidance. Like therapists, Tarot readers rely on interpersonal skills of listening to clients and helping them to interpret their own narratives through dialogue.  

In some ways, Tarot readers mirror the emotional labour that women often provide informally and without pay, but with remuneration. It is both paid and un-credentialed, and thus occupies a halfway space between the unpaid work characteristic of women, and the accreditation of that labour which demarcates paid caring professions.

The goal of responsible Tarot readers is not to replace professional help for serious concerns. Biddy Tarot emphasizes the importance of referral, sending clients seeking specific answers for health, legal, relationship or financial issues to the appropriate professionals. The ideal Tarot reader seems to offer a safe, confidential and informal space where individuals can talk about their lives in a holistic way. Like the randomness of the cards itself, Tarot readings offer a non-hierarchical approach to finding emotional equilibrium and progress through the unavoidable challenges and joys of daily life.

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Is it Fair to Blame President Trump’s Behavior on Mental Illness?

A dark photo of Donald Trump clapping.

On October 25, former Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn (a Republican) said that President Trump has “a personality disorder.”  He was not the first to posit that President Trump has some form of mental illness. The press has been engaging with such speculation since the start of his campaign, though there has been a decided increase of late. On October 26, New York Times columnist David Brooks reported that some Republican senators thought Trump is “suffering from early Alzheimer’s.” In an article titled “Some Republicans are starting to more openly question Trump’s Mental health,” Business Insider reports that “One psychiatric professor at Yale said about half a dozen lawmakers had contacted her over the past several months.”

Continue reading “Is it Fair to Blame President Trump’s Behavior on Mental Illness?”

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Diagnosis from a Distance: The Ethics of the Goldwater Rule

The September/October 1964 issue of Fact magazine was dedicated to the then Republican nominee for president, Barry Goldwater, and his fitness for office. One of the founders of Fact, Ralph Ginzburg, had sent out a survey to over 12,000 psychiatrists asking a single question: “Do you believe Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States?” Only about 2,400 responses were received, and about half of the responses indicated that Goldwater was not psychologically fit to be president. The headline of that issue of Fact read: “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater is Psychologically Unfit to be President!”

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Learning How to Die: Lessons from Oliver Sacks

During my first year at DePauw, I was assigned a reading from a book called A Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. My interest was so piqued by the assigned snippet that I couldn’t help but read the entire book. I was captivated by the accessible and insightful way the author, Oliver Sacks, relayed unique patient case studies that he had encountered in his career as a neurologist. Sadly, Oliver Sacks, who touched many people through both his medical practice and his writing and who made many lasting impacts in his field, passed away last Sunday, August 30, of terminal liver cancer. Continue reading “Learning How to Die: Lessons from Oliver Sacks”

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A New Approach to Pedophilia

Few crimes are as stigmatized as those that stem from pedophilia. Pervasive tropes of the pedophile as the serial child abuser, shadily lurking in public parks, have worked to demonize the mindset to a degree rarely seen with other crimes. This stigma is so strong that, in states like California, therapists must report clients who admitted that they viewed child pornography, regardless of their attempt to seek treatment. Such measures may seem like a strong stand against pedophilia, a mindset that contributes to the abuse and exploitation of thousands of children. But is criminalizing pedophilia in this manner effective?

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