Primrose Road

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior is a quick read, shelved with Who Moved My Cheese-style books, but far more insightful (and interesting). The book describes experiments in economics, psychology, sociology, and biology that have attempted to explain why people make obviously bad decisions, and tells the stories of some of these radically bad decisions, including those that led to the Tenerife airplane disaster and Challenger explosion. Some of the research it describes also has implications for educational psychology: while reward systems work in terms of specific goals, they're much more complicated and problematic than we may think, actually suppressing "altruistic" mechanisms in the brain. One amusing fact presented in the book: On the American "Who Wants To Be A Millionare?", audiences always try help the contestant when polled for the "ask the audience" lifeline, voting for the answer they genuinely believe to be correct; on the French and British versions of the show, audiences tend to help those contestants who they feel are "deserving" of the million-dollar prize but try to sabotage (i.e. purposefully voting for the wrong answer) those contestants who they feel aren't deserving of the prize (for example, one man in France who didn't know that the moon revolved around the Earth); finally, on the Russian "Millionaire," audiences almost always "deliberately misled both smart and less smart contestants alike." "Millionaire" provides for the authors a jumping-off point for describing different cultures' notions of "fairness," and how perhaps the most economically rational notions of fairness come from an isolated tribe in the Peruvian Amazon. The book may go too far into the hackneyed territory of "negotiation skills" in the last chapter, but the stories it tells and research it describes offer some great insight into why people may be evolutionarily biased towards the irrational.

Whenever I read about someone buying into publishing or multilevel marketing scams or the like, my first question is how could (s)he not have known? With the plethora of information out there on *this very Internet* about such scams, a simple Google search could have allowed him or her to avoid a bad decision. But it may be more complicated: this is merely speculation based on personal experience, but I wonder if the problem is not that many of us ignore the information, but that we simply don't seek out the information in the first place. In 2002, several family members (including one who does very good work in a field that is based in real medicine but unfortunately also saturated with alternative theories of medicine) recommended that I visit a chiropractor. Months earlier, I'd had two operations on my jaw after I'd contracted a rare jaw infection (apparently so rare that it was the diagnosis on an episode of House ;)); after the procedures and some other fun stuff, I developed tingling and numbness around my jaw, and bad pain in my left shoulder and neck. As a first-year master's degree student who was still kind of into Wicca (yes, please feel free to beat me up in the schoolyard after class), I was uncomfortable with the neurologist who electrocuted me (ok, a bit of an exaggeration), stuck a giant needle in my arm and twisted it around (really, but it's an actual nerve test) and suggested I have steroids injected into my head (ok, so I may be remembering that slightly wrong). I didn't like taking painkillers and muscle relaxers, because I am -- as my father has aptly described me -- the world's worst junkie, where everything makes me drowsy and nonfunctional. So I saw the chiropractor as a valid alternative. I remember one day after my first two weeks of seeing the chiropractor (three adjustments a week were recommended at first!), I was sitting in Shakespeare and Gender class -- it was summer and we were all reading Twelfth Night in tank tops and shorts -- I felt an excruciating pain in my shoulder. In my mind, I didn't connect the pain to the chiropractic treatments, but simply believed it was pain that was already there, and that the chiropractic treatments would soon heal it. Indeed, weeks later, I did start to feel better. Today, I can chalk this up to (1) the placebo effect and (2) the fact that my brain was finally starting to tell my body that the area around my jaw wasn't injured anymore, but at the time, I assumed it was because of the chiropractor, and continued to visit the chiropractor for years, thinking my monthly visits to his office were allowing me to "maintain" my condition. As I think back on it now, I did have quite a few days where I had pain, and yet never once connected it to the possibility that chiropractic care is based on a theory of imaginary subluxations in the spine. Late last month, I visited my general practitioner because of unusually bad neck and shoulder pain (I try to avoid the meds, but was a week away from a 12-hour train ride to Toronto) and he pointed out, following a nerve test, that I most likely still had pinched nerves, despite various chiropractic claims. I told the nurse performing the test about my chiropractor visits (and about the fact that my student insurance won't allow neurologist visits), and she said, quite rightly as I realize now, that having your spine moved back and forth for six years *can't* be too good for you. I find it fascinating that there is (and has been for years) plenty of information out there about research that shows that chiropractic is only beneficial as a form of physical therapy for lower back pain, it to a large degree disregards important components of the germ theory of medicine, and quite frighteningly, that neck adjustments can cause stroke. Though I've spent an average of two hours a day on the Internet since 1996, I somehow managed to never encounter this widely available information. I wasn't ignoring what was right in front of me; I simply was (perhaps somehow by choice) not encountering what should have been right in front of me. Please accept my apologies for breaking the No Blogging About Pain Law of the Internet (which I made up just now, but it's an excellent law). It's interesting, though, that people -- myself included -- can miss the obvious when the obvious challenges their favorite placebos or scams.