This column will change your life: consistency bias
‘Believing that change happens only to your environment, or other people, makes life harder to navigate’
It really was the last time when the world was simple and small,” sighed the US television writer Adam Goldberg a while back, explaining his decision to set his new sitcom, The Gold- bergs, in the 1980s. What made that era different, he argued, was that the internet hadn’t yet erased distance; your world consisted mainly of your immediate family and surroundings. But if you teleported back to Goldberg’s world in 1985, I don’t think it’s his lack of web access you’d notice first. Like me, Goldberg is in his late 30s; in the 1980s, he was a child. “The 80s wasn’t ‘the last time the world was simple’,” one commentator, Paul Waldman, chided on his blog. “The 80s was the last time your world was simple.” The hazy memory of a simpler past is enormously powerful in politics: see the Tea Party, or the hate-nostalgia of the Daily Mail. But look closely at the era being praised, whether it’s the 40s or the 90s, and you’ll frequently find the praise-giver was about seven at the time. Unless you’re eight, the world really has changed since you were seven. But possibly not as much as you have.
Only marginally less cliched is the idea that the “millennial” generation is full of narcissists
– overgrown children, bursting with entitlement, incapable of sensible decisions about love, work or money, because they’re convinced that they’re so special. It may be true that today’s twentysomethings are more narcissistic than 50-year-olds, but when you analyse the data longitudinally, as researchers did in 2010, you find that’s because twentysomethings usually are. Narcissism is a developmental stage, not a symptom of the times. Young adults have been condemned as the “Me Generation” since at least the turn of last century. Then they get older, get appalled by youngsters nowadays, and start the condemning themselves.
– overgrown children, bursting with entitlement, incapable of sensible decisions about love, work or money, because they’re convinced that they’re so special. It may be true that today’s twentysomethings are more narcissistic than 50-year-olds, but when you analyse the data longitudinally, as researchers did in 2010, you find that’s because twentysomethings usually are. Narcissism is a developmental stage, not a symptom of the times. Young adults have been condemned as the “Me Generation” since at least the turn of last century. Then they get older, get appalled by youngsters nowadays, and start the condemning themselves.
One culprit here is how desperate we are to see ourselves as the still, calm centre of the uni- verse – fixed lenses, observing a rapidly changing world, but not changing ourselves. (And not only fixed, but omniscient: when the author Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote an essay attacking mil- lennials for not having produced a cultural equivalent of The White Album, it apparently nev- er occurred to her that there might be culture of which she wasn’t aware.) In psychology, the term “consistency bias” refers to the well-studied way we’ll retroactively adjust our attitudes to avoid admitting to being changeable. Ask students to rate their anxiety before an exam, then to recall those feelings later, and they’ll adjust their memories based on their performance: those who did well underestimate their earlier worry; those who did badly overestimate it.
Goldberg and the anti-narcissist brigade – and maybe all of us – may be victims of a bigger, existential version of this: an unwillingness to concede that “who we are” is something rather unstable. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of nostalgia. But believing that change happens only to your environment, or other people, makes life harder to navigate: it means you’ll always as- sume it’s your spouse, job or city that’s not how he, she or it used to be, rather than yourself – thus blinding you to possible solutions when tensions arise. Of course, back in my day, I think most people realised this. But now everything’s gone to the dogs. I blame all this newfangled swing music.
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
When Wheelchairs Are Cool
In an age of equal rights, is it ever O.K. to play the disability card?
By BEN MATTLIN
JULY 31, 2014
LOS ANGELES — LAST week, the celebrity gossip site TMZ posted pictures of Justin Bieber in a wheelchair. He was not at a hospital. He was at Disneyland. As everyone knows, Disney patrons in wheelchairs get to cut to the front of the lines. But as a dispute flared over whether this was Mr. Bieber’s intent, becoming a trending topic on Twitter, one fact remained unassailable: I was there first.
One of the great perks of being in a wheelchair — as I have been since age 4 — is being able to cut lines. Sometimes people let you go ahead of them at the grocery store. Sometimes theater and sports arena box offices give you discount tickets. When I was a kid, I often got backstage passes. In short, you get to take advantage of others’ pity — or at least their desire to keep things simple and not cause a scene. You get treated like a V.I.P. You get treated like Justin Bieber, except without the screaming fans.
The teen heartthrob’s publicists said that he was just resting an injured knee, not trying to pretend he was, well, like me. But I prefer to think otherwise. After all, they also acknowledged that even without the wheelchair, he would still get to circumvent the endless queues, to avert a riot. The point is that he was not afraid to be seen in a wheelchair, which, to me, is a point for my team.
I’ve never pretended to be in a wheelchair to curry favor, of course, but I’ve often felt that I can play the disability card for all it’s worth. I have, I confess, used it to hustle my kids through Disney lines, even though I knew full well that I wasn’t actually going to get on the ride myself.
Besides, sometimes you can’t help it. People offer you stuff. Strangers smile at you, give you a thumbs-up, pat you on the shoulder and say, “Good for you for being outside today!” (I can never quite decide whether that’s complimentary or condescending — or both.)
The mantra of disability rights is “no pity.” Yet the truth is, taking advantage of one’s disability — or rather, of other people’s solicitousness — is one of the true joys of life on wheels. When I was a kid, before equal-access laws attempted to level the playing field, I often got into movies free. I never asked for it, but I never refused it either. “I’ll just stay in my wheelchair,” I sometimes said, as if it were a consolation for not taking an actual seat from a paying customer. (Still, I had my limits. When sweet old ladies offered to buy me candy or a cookie, it was decidedly creepy. I never once said yes.)
This kind of cloying generosity was a great source of laughter when I was growing up with spinal muscular atrophy. My older, nondisabled brother and I used to joke that if we were ever orphaned, or simply needed some extra spending money, we could clean up by begging on street corners. He would accost passers-by while I would act, well, as handicapped as possible, moaning and drooling and contorting my face. Sure, this gallows humor was a sort of defense mechanism. But the constant clash between what others thought they knew about me just from glancing at my skinny, floppy, wheelchair-riding limbs and what we actually knew about me — that I was a smart, alert, regular guy who happened to require a lot of assistance — occasioned much familial hilarity.
Now I know better, of course. It wasn’t really funny. And if I want fairness and equality, I have to pay the price — even if it’s full price.
But many well-meaning able-bodied folks remain frustratingly ignorant about people with disabilities. We even have a term for it now — “ableism” — though I’m not sure how much it helps. People may know that it’s wrong to exclude or underestimate the disabled, but I fear they’re rarely clear on exactly what that entails or how to behave. There is still something hopelessly “other” about folks with disabilities. Wheelie Justin may be a hopeful sign for the future, when the very image of disability no longer stigmatizes.
I’ve long believed in disability pride, a.k.a. Crip Cool (there’s even the #cripswag hashtag on Twitter). To me, that has never meant being an awe-inspiring overachiever, someone who succeeds despite a disability. Rather, it’s the opposite — someone who embraces his or her disability and isn’t afraid to show it. Wheelchairs can be fun. Voice-recognition technology is a blast. Vans with automatic ramps are awesome. And don’t forget our coveted parking spaces. All of which help mitigate the bad stuff.
So go ahead and play disabled. As long as it’s done with joy and respect — not to tease or poke fun — I won’t be offended. Just don’t do it for the freebies, which are harder and harder to find these days anyway. Do it as you do anything else, because you think it’s cool.
And if Mr. Bieber wants to give me a call, I’d be happy to show him how to pop wheelies.
The upcoming work was done in collaboration with another student.. It was a layout and illustartion pair. The first spread has been illustrated by me whereas the layout has been done by Keya Lall and the second spread layout has been designed by me whereas the illustartion is done by her. The articles have been chosen by the people who designed the layout for their respective illustrators.
