The automotive industry is in the early stages of a potentially transformative evolution where todays personally owned, driver-driven vehicles likely will travel alongside shared and self-driving cars.

The speed with which this future vision arrives hinges on both technological and regulatory advances and on how quickly consumer expectations and behavior shift. Because even if the benefits of a world of shared self-driving cars seem self-evident, companies should not assume consumers will reach a similar conclusion.

In fact, peoples cognitive biases suggest many individuals may be reluctant to relinquish their personally owned and driver-driven vehicles.

Human behavior often can lead us to delay or forgo adopting new technology (in this case, shared and autonomous vehicles), even if that technology provides demonstrable benefits. While research in behavioral economics and social psychology has revealed deep and consistent biases that can lead to suboptimal choices, it also has uncovered potential ways to overcome these mental limitations.

By constructing choices and framing new mobility options in ways that encourage adoption, companies, governments, nonprofits and others can help ensure the future of mobility arrives sooner rather than later.

For decades, researchers have documented the ways in which human decision-making departs from classic assumptions of rational, cost-benefit calculation. Some salient biases that could lead customers to balk at adopting such technological and service innovations are shown below.

The significant investments being made in the future of mobility could be undermined without a careful and thorough consideration of how consumers might perceive and adopt these new technologies and services. Here are a handful of lessons from behavioral economics that can be used to nudge consumers and help overcome cognitive barriers to adoption:

Shared mobility and autonomous vehicles offer many potential benefits, and while important developments emerge nearly daily, the future of mobility still lies ahead of us. How quickly that future emerges is likely to depend not only on the merits of emerging technological solutions, but also on how well key players understand and address consumers cognitive biases.

Derek Pankratz is a research manager with the Center for Integrated Research in Deloitte Services. His research focuses on the confluence of emerging technological and social trends across industries.

Excerpt from:
Using Behavioral Economics to Accelerate Autonomous Future - Ward's Auto

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

by Michael Lewis

Norton, 362 pp., $28.95

We are living in an age in which the behavioral sciences have become inescapable. The findings of social psychology and behavioral economics are being employed to determine the news we read, the products we buy, the cultural and intellectual spheres we inhabit, and the human networks, online and in real life, of which we are a part. Aspects of human societies that were formerly guided by habit and tradition, or spontaneity and whim, are now increasingly the intended or unintended consequences of decisions made on the basis of scientific theories of the human mind and human well-being.

The behavioral techniques that are being employed by governments and private corporations do not appeal to our reason; they do not seek to persuade us consciously with information and argument. Rather, these techniques change behavior by appealing to our nonrational motivations, our emotional triggers and unconscious biases. If psychologists could possess a systematic understanding of these nonrational motivations they would have the power to influence the smallest aspects of our lives and the largest aspects of our societies.

Michael Lewiss The Undoing Project seems destined to be the most popular celebration of this ongoing endeavor to understand and correct human behavior. It recounts the complex friendship and remarkable intellectual partnership of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the psychologists whose work has provided the foundation for the new behavioral science. It was their findings that first suggested we might understand human irrationality in a systematic way. When our thinking errs, they claimed, it does so predictably. Kahneman tells us that thanks to the various counterintuitive findingsdrawn from surveysthat he and Tversky made together, we now understand the marvels as well as the flaws of intuitive thought.

Kahneman presented their new model of the mind to the general reader in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), where he characterized the human mind as the interrelated operation of two systems of thought: System One, which is fast and automatic, including instincts, emotions, innate skills shared with animals, as well as learned associations and skills; and System Two, which is slow and deliberative and allows us to correct for the errors made by System One.

Lewiss tale of this intellectual revolution begins in 1955 with the twenty-one-year-old Kahneman devising personality tests for the Israeli army and discovering that optimal accuracy could be attained by devising tests that removed, as far as possible, the gut feelings of the tester. The testers were employing System One intuitions that skewed their judgment and could be avoided if tests were devised and implemented in ways that disallowed any role for individual judgment and bias. This is an especially captivating episode for Lewis, since his best-selling book, Moneyball (2003), told the analogous tale of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, who used new forms of data analytics to override the intuitive judgments of baseball scouts in picking players.

The Undoing Project also applauds the story of the psychologist Lewis Goldberg, a colleague of Kahneman and Tversky in their days in Eugene, Oregon, who discovered that a simple algorithm could more accurately diagnose cancer than highly trained experts who were biased by their emotions and faulty intuitions. Algorithmsfixed rules for processing dataunlike the often difficult, emotional human protagonists of the book, are its uncomplicated heroes, quietly correcting for the subtle but consequential flaws in human thought.

The most influential of Kahneman and Tverskys discoveries, however, is prospect theory, since this has provided the most important basis of the biases and heuristics approach of the new behavioral sciences. They looked at the way in which people make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and found that their behavior violated expected utility theorya fundamental assumption of economic theory that holds that decision-makers reason instrumentally about how to maximize their gains. Kahneman and Tversky realized that they were not observing a random series of errors that occur when people attempted to do this. Rather, they identified a dozen systematic violations of the axioms of rationality in choices between gambles. These systematic errors make human irrationality predictable.

Lewis describes, with sensitivity to the political turmoil that constantly assailed them in Israel, the realization by Kahneman and Tversky that emotions powerfully influence our intuitive analysis of probability and risk. We particularly aim, on this account, to avoid negative emotions such as regret and loss. Lewis tells us that after the Yom Kippur War, Israelis deeply regretted having to fight at a disadvantage as a result of being taken by surprise. But they did not regret Israels failure to take the action that both Kahneman and Tversky thought could have avoided war: giving back the territorial gains from the 1967 war. It seemed to Kahneman and Tversky that in this case as in others people regretted losses caused by their actions more than they regretted inaction that could have averted the loss. And if this were generally the case it would regularly inform peoples judgments about risk.

That research eventually yielded heuristics, or rules of thumb, that have now become well-known shorthand expressions for specific flaws in our intuitive thinking. Some of these seem to be linked by a shared emotional basis: the endowment effect (overvaluation of what we already have), status quo bias (an emotional preference for maintaining the status quo), and loss aversion (the tendency to attribute much more weight to potential losses than potential gains when assessing risk) are all related to an innate conservatism about what we feel we have already invested in.

Many of these heuristics are easy to recognize in ourselves. The availability heuristic describes our tendency to think that something is much more likely to occur if we happen to be, for contingent reasons, strongly aware of the phenomenon. After September 11, for instance, fear of terrorism was undoubtedly disproportionate to the probability of its occurrence relative to car crashes and other causes of death that were not flashing across our TV screens night and day. We find it hard to tune out information that should, strictly speaking, not be of high relevance to our judgment.

But in spite of revealing these deep flaws in our thinking, Lewis supplies a consistently redemptive narrative, insisting that this new psychological knowledge permits us to compensate for human irrationality in ways that can improve human well-being. The field of behavioral economics, a subject pioneered by Richard Thaler and rooted in the work of Kahneman and Tversky, has taken up the task of figuring out how to turn us into better versions of ourselves. If the availability heuristic encourages people to ensure against very unlikely occurrences, nudges such as providing vivid reminders of more likely bad outcomes can be used to make their judgments of probability more realistic. If a bias toward the status quo means that people tend not to make changes that would benefit them, for instance by refusing to choose between retirement plans, we can make the more beneficial option available by automatically enrolling people in a plan with the option to withdraw if they choose.

This is exactly what Cass Sunstein did when when he oversaw the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama White House (Obama subsequently created a Social and Behavioral Sciences Team). He devised choice architectures or nudges that would work with the intuitive apparatus people have in order to guide their choices. In Lewiss hands, the potential for doing good through such means can be a kind of magic, stealing like moonlight through the homes of sleeping Americans:

Millions of US corporate and government employees had woken up one day during the 2000s and found they no longer needed to enroll themselves in retirement plans but instead were automatically enrolled.

Sunstein and Thaler have described the political philosophy of such interventions as Libertarian Paternalism. It is libertarian because they do not impose mandates to narrow peoples choice, but merely frame choices or provide incentives that tend to make people better off, as judged by themselves. Their claim is that this form of influence, albeit often unconscious, is not manipulative or coercive because the possibility of a person choosing differently is not closed down. Lewiss book ends with an uncomplicated celebration of this form of guided but purportedly free choice.

Lewis does not discuss the ways in which the same behavioral science can be used quite deliberately for the purposes of deception and manipulation, though this has been one of its most important applications. Frank Babetski, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence analyst who also holds the Analytical Tradecraft chair at the Sherman Kent School of Intelligence Analysis at the CIA University, has called Kahnemans Thinking, Fast and Slow a must read for intelligence officers.

Babetski has described the use of behavioral science for deceptive practices that are part of the intelligence officers trade.1 He is envisaging this use as constrained by law and by intelligence goals that are ultimately determined by democratic governments. But in doing so he also reveals the potential for coercion that is implicit in these tools for anyone willing to wield it.

The deeper concern that Lewiss happy narrative omits entirely is that behavioral scientists claim to have developed the capacity to manipulate peoples emotional lives in ways that shape their fundamental preferences, values, and desires. In Kahnemans recent work he has developed the idea, originally set out in one of his papers with Tversky (who died in 1996), that we are not good judges of our own well-being. Our intuitions are unstable and conflicting. We may retrospectively judge an experience more enjoyable than our subjective reports suggested at the time. Kahneman, working with others in the field of positive psychology, has helped to establish a new subfield, hedonic psychology, which measures not just pleasure but well-being in a broader sense, in order to establish a more objective account of our condition than our subjective reflection can afford us.

This new subfield has led the way in combining research in behavioral science with big data, a further development that is beyond the scope of Lewiss book, but one that has tremendously expanded the potential applications of Kahneman and Tverskys ideas. Psychologists at the World Well-Being Project, at the University of Pennsylvania, have collaborated with Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell, computational psychologists from the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge and developers of myPersonality. This was a Facebook application that allowed users to take psychometric tests and gathered six million test results and four million individual profiles. Scores on these tests could be combined with enormous amounts of data from the users Facebook environment. The application has been used in conjunction with personality measures such as the big five, also known as the OCEAN model, which purportedly measures openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Words such as apparently and actually, for example, are taken to correlate with a higher degree of neuroticism. The architects of myPersonality claim that these tests, in conjunction with other data, permit the prediction of individual levels of well-being.

The guiding idea for the World Well-Being Project is that we need not rely on our faulty subjective judgments about what will make us happy or what path in life will give us a sense of meaning.2 But if those studying behavioral influence are targeting the form of well-being that we value and the kind of happiness we seek, then it is harder to see how peoples being better off, as judged by themselves genuinely preserves their freedom. And this concern is not a purely academic one. The manipulation of preferences has driven the commercialization of behavioral insights and is now fundamental to the digital economy that shapes so much of our lives.

In 2007, and again in 2008, Kahneman gave a masterclass in Thinking About Thinking to, among others, Jeff Bezos (the founder of Amazon), Larry Page (Google), Sergey Brin (Google), Nathan Myhrvold (Microsoft), Sean Parker (Facebook), Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla), Evan Williams (Twitter), and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia).3 At the 2008 meeting, Richard Thaler also spoke about nudges, and in the clips we can view online he describes choice architectures that guide people toward specific behaviors but that can be reversed with one click if the subject doesnt like the outcome. In Kahnemans talk, however, he tells his assembled audience of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that primingpicking a suitable atmosphereis one of the most important areas of psychological research, a technique that involves offering people cues unconsciously (for instance flashing smiley faces on a screen at a speed that makes them undetectable) in order to influence their mood and behavior. He insists that there are predictable and coherent associations that can be exploited by this sort of priming. If subjects are unaware of this unconscious influence, the freedom to resist it begins to look more theoretical than real.

The Silicon Valley executives clearly saw the commercial potential in these behavioral techniques, since they have now become integral to that sector. When Thaler and Sunstein last updated their nudges.org website in 2011, it contained an interview with John Kenny, of the Institute of Decision Making, in which he says:

You cant understand the success of digital platforms like Amazon, Facebook, Farmville, Nike Plus, and Groupon if you dont understand behavioral economic principles. Behavioral economics will increasingly be providing the behavioral insight that drives digital strategy.

And Jeff Bezos of Amazon, in a letter to shareholders in April 2015, declared that Amazon sellers have a significant business advantage because through our Selling Coach program, we generate a steady stream of automated machine-learned nudges (more than 70 million in a typical week). It is hard to imagine that these 70 million nudges leave Amazon customers with the full freedom to reverse, after conscious reflection, the direction in which they are being nudged.

Facebook, too, has embraced the behavioral insights described by Kahneman and Thaler, having received wide and unwanted publicity for researching priming. In 2012 its Core Data Science Team, along with researchers at Cornell University and the University of California at San Francisco, experimented with emotional priming on Facebook, without the awareness of the approximately 700,000 users involved, to see whether manipulation of their news feeds would affect the positivity or negativity of their own posts. When this came to light in 2014 it was generally seen as an unacceptable form of psychological manipulation. But Facebook defended the research on the grounds that its users consent to their terms of service was sufficient to imply consent to such experiments.

Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft who attended Kahnemans masterclasses in 2007, went on to become an adviser to Kahnemans own consulting firm, TGG Group, chaired by the former Citibank head Vikram Pandit. This group aims, according to its website, to unpack the knowledge hidden in big data, designchoice architectures, and reduce noise in decision-making (that is, to eliminate inconsistencies created by conflicting subjective judgments in organizations).

The website does not list any of TGGs clients, though early articles mention its pitching Deutsche Bank. In conjunction with big data, behavioral science has become an extraordinarily powerful tool in the world of business and finance, and Kahneman has not shied away from these applications. Lewiss book ends with the thrill of the phone ringing in Kahnemans living room on an October morning in 2002, as we anticipate the announcement that he has won the Nobel Prize for his work with Tversky. But the story of their ideas silently transforming our social world, in conjunction with data we supply, has only just begun.

Since the electoral surprise of November 8, 2016, the magical tale of behavioral science making the world a better place has been replaced by a darker story in the public mind. It has been widely reported that Trumps team, as adviser Jared Kushner puts it, played Moneyball with the election. News outlets have claimed that although Obamas and Clintons teams both used social media, data analytics, and finely grained targeting to promote their message, Trumps team, according to Forbes, delved into message tailoring, sentiment manipulation and machine learning.4 If this sinister level of manipulation seems far-fetched, it nevertheless reflects the boasts of Cambridge Analytica, the company they employed to do this for them, a subsidiary of the British-based SCL Group.

The company, whose board has included Trumps chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has also been held responsible by the press for the outcome of the Brexit vote of June 2016. Its CEO, Alexander Nix, claims in a presentation entitled The Power of Big Data and Psychographics (which can be found on Youtube5) that Cambridge Analytica has used OCEAN personality tests in combination with data mined from social media to produce psychographic profilesmodels that predict personality traitsfor every adult in America. It did so without the consent of Kosinski and Stillwell, who developed the technique. Nix claims that they possess between four and five thousand data points on every potential voter, after combining the personality test results with attitudinal data, such as credit card spending patterns, consumer preferences, Facebook likes, and civic and political engagement.

There is an interesting slippage in the presentation between Nix saying that hundreds of thousands of people have filled out Cambridge Analyticas questionnaires and his claiming they have this amount of data on every American adult. It is either an empty boast or there is a disturbing story to be told about how they acquired this information. Nix nevertheless claims that they can use their data in combination with tracking cookies, data from cable companies, and other media tools to target very specific audiences with messages that are persuasive because they are informed by behavioral science.

In describing their behavioral methods of persuasion, Nix gives the example of a private beach owner who wishes to keep the public out. He might, Nix says, put up an informational sign that seeks to inform attitudes, such as: Public beach ends here: private property. Or he could seek to probe an altogether much more powerful, underlying motivation by putting up a sign that says Warning: shark sighted. The threat of being eaten by a shark, Nix claims, will be more effective. Similarly, in videos made by Cambridge Analyticas research wing, the Behavioral Dynamics Institute, the group describes strategies for appealing directly to peoples underlying fears and desires in ways that are continuous with the insights of behavioral economics, but that seem less scrupulous about employing lies or half-truths to influence System One motivations.

This behavioral microtargeting is what Nix claims to have used when Cambridge Analytica worked on the Cruz campaign. But it is important to remember that this much-discussed video is a sales pitch.

Behavioral techniques, microtargeting, and data analysis are not new to political campaigns, as Sasha Issenberg has shown in The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns (2012). Accurate and detailed psychographic profiles are a product that everyone in this business wants, so thats what Nix claims to be selling. Doubts have been raised about whether the Trump team in fact employed these techniques, though the Cambridge Analytica website has posted articles asserting that they did. There has also been some skepticism about whether the psychographic techniques Nix describes actually work.6

It is impossible to test the claims of organizations such as Cambridge Analytica, since there can be no control group, only the kind of ambiguous observational data that can be attained in a very noisy environment. But this doesnt mean that there is no threat to democracy once we start relying less on information that can be critically scrutinized in favor of unconscious manipulation.

Whatever the truth of Cambridge Analyticas claims, the very existence of such companies tells us something important about the weight that unconscious influence, relative to reasoned argument, now plays in political campaigns. Kahnemans TGG Group is not involved in the business of political influence. But according to Issenberg, in 2006, a private group at the University of California, Los Angeles, called the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, which was run by psychologist Craig Fox and included Kahneman and Thaler, began to persuade Democrats that they needed to employ behavioral science. The secrecy of the group was a result of qualms about how such initiatives would be perceived. By now, behavioral strategies are in the open and are ubiquitous. The term propaganda has been replaced by a behavioral approach to persuasive communication with quantifiable results.

Companies such as SCL Group claim to have the weapons to win large-scale ideological struggles. We can watch online a video of Nigel Oakes, the head of SCL Group, delivering a presentation to the US Department of State on behalf of SCL Defence, one of its subsidiaries. He points out that traditional advertisers who appeal to individuals and capture 0.6 percent of their market are considered very successful. Strategic communication, however, requires group communication: Theres no point in having .6 percent of Syrians supporting you or .6 percent of al-Qaeda. Weve got to convince the entire communities.7 The part of the pitch in which he describes his methods is not available for public viewing.

The claim that SCL can deliver this is an extraordinary one, even for a company that has experience in the field through psychological operations led by Steve Tatham, a former commander in the British navy. He worked, for example, with Andrew Mackay, the commander of the British armed forces in Afghanistan, in order to win areas that had been flattened by kinetic activity through persuasive techniques derived from behavioral economics and refined in theater.8

Many of the relevant techniques were suggested directly by Kahneman and Tversky in their 1995 essay Conflict Resolution: A Cognitive Perspective. Tatham and Mackay, in a book on their initiatives, Behavioral Conflict: Why Understanding People and Their Motivations Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict (2011), describe how they were used in the Afghan war. They employed prospect theory, for example, to think about motivations, realizing that the avoidance of further losses was more important to local populations than the potential realization of gains. The reconstruction of the Kajaki Dam in Helmand, while strategically important, was too remote an incentive to limit insurgent activity around the dam. More immediate incentives had to be created. Kahneman and Tverskys insight into the wisdom of crowds was employed when thinking about decision-making in an Afghan shura, or assembly, where the British sought to empower those individuals who had the right ideas but the least amount of authority.

We cannot, however, gather data on the successes of these initiatives, since the psychological factors involved are opaque and the counterfactuals impossibly complex. When the party wishing to persuade a population arrives with tanks, guns, and drones, and the population itself is internally divided, we cannot easily determine the extent to which cooperation with the occupying forces is the result of behavioral techniques. There is as yet no scientific evidence of how the military can noncoercively influence group behavior on a large scale in zones of conflict. And claims about winning over the majority of a population in any given state are entirely untested.

Nevertheless, SCL Group, which claims to have mastered behavioral influence both online and in the field, recently signed a $500,000 contract with the State Department and according to The Washington Post is in negotiations with the Trump administration to help the Pentagon and other government agencies with counter radicalization program.9 They claim to have offers for their services from all over the world. This in turn will doubtless engender competition from around the world.

The idea of Libertarian Paternalism, in which the tools of the new behavioral sciences remain in the hands of benign liberal mandarins, has come to seem hopelessly quaint. In a more combative and unstable environment there must clearly be greater concern about our capacity to regulate the uses of behavioral science, the robustness of the fundamental research, and the political or financial motivations of any behavioral initiatives to be employed or countered.

Nonrational forms of persuasion are clearly nothing new. But many social psychologists credit Kahneman and Tversky with a profoundly original theory of the human mind, one that exposes systematic, unconscious sources of irrationality, just as Freuds idea of the unconscious was taken to do by previous generations of psychologists. The view that social psychology and behavioral economics are rooted in robust fundamental research of this kind lends the imprimatur of cutting-edge science to the millions of behavioral initiatives now being undertaken across the world.

When Kahnemans Thinking, Fast and Slow was published in 2011, it elicited comparisons to the innovations of Descartes, Darwin, and Freud. But philosophers have long had qualms about the two-systems model Kahneman sets out there. In 1981, L. Jonathan Cohen published a paper entitled Can Human Irrationality Be Experimentally Demonstrated? In it he developed various lines of criticism of Kahneman and Tverskys work, but the one to which Kahneman was particularly moved to respond was the idea that we cannot easily separate intuition from other cognitive functions, that we in fact have no choice but to rely on intuition in our reasoning.

Kahneman rejected the idea that there can be a realm of intuition that cannot be rationally evaluated because people often find inconsistent intuitions appealing.10 If our intuitions conflict, rational deliberation will have to be called upon to adjudicate the disagreement. However, in his ongoing defense of this position he has failed to take into account what Cohen and other philosophers mean by intuition, and so failed to engage the sense in which intuitions are necessary for deliberation.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman characterizes System One intuitions as fast and automatic, whereas System Two reasoning is slow and deliberate. In other words, he characterizes our intuitive judgments phenomenologically, by describing the speed and effortlessness with which they come to us. They are, in effect, snap judgments.When philosophers describe our reliance on intuition, however, they are not concerned with the phenomenology of judgments per se but with the architecture of justification.

We have to rely on intuition, they contend, where our discursive justifications come to an end, for instance in the fundamental laws of logic, such as the principle of noncontradiction, or basic rules of inference. We cannot justify our belief in these laws in ways that dont beg further questions. Our justification for employing them rests on our finding them self-evident. We cannot deliberate rationally without them. Since they are the necessary basis for any deliberative thought, we cannot characterize mental functions as straightforwardly belonging to an intuitive System One or a deliberative System Two.

A further problem arises when we try to assign errors to a particular set of systematic biases, or attribute them to specific flawed heuristics. If we wish to accuse someone employing the word probable or likely of making a false probabilistic judgment, we need to be sure that they are employing the very same concept of probability that is the object of analysis in probability theory. If we wish to accuse someone of making false probabilistic judgments because they are employing a faulty heuristic, we need to be sure that the correct explanation isnt that certain people have some complicating beliefs in the background, in luck or fate or God, for instance.

Similarly, when peoples judgments appear to be affected by irrelevant stimuli, for example a reminder of our mortality seeming to make us more risk-averse (priming effects, that is), a very large number of potential causal factors would have to be ruled out before such irrational biases could be confidently described as features intrinsic to System One. If it is not a simple task to divide thinking into two separate systems, it will not be easy to reduce the complex interactions between unconscious biases, background beliefs, and deliberation in any given case to an identifiable and systematic error.

These objections, if correct, would suggest that many of the psychological experiments Kahneman cites in Thinking, Fast and Slow would be impossible to replicate. And indeed the very year that it was published a replicability crisis emerged in the field of psychology, but most severely in social psychology. The psychologist Ulrich Schimmack has recently created a Replicability Index that analyzes the statistical significance of published results in psychology. He and his collaborators, Moritz Heene and Kamini Kesavan, have applied this to the studies cited in Thinking, Fast and Slow to predict how replicable they will be, assigning letter grades to each chapter. Kahneman and Tverskys own work gets good grades, but many other studies fare very poorly. The chapter on priming, for example, gets an F.11 As reported in Slate, the overall grade of the chapters assessed so far is a C-.12 Kahneman has posted a gracious response to their findings, regretting that he cited studies that used such small sample sizes.13

This seems to represent a serious challenge to the biases and heuristics approach to persuasion. Psychologists have not yet uncovered the fundamental mechanisms governing human thought or finally found the secret key to mind control. Since the human mind is not straightforwardly a mechanism (or we are at least far from proving that it is) and its workings are unfathomably complex so far, they may never succeed in that venture. Some of the biases they have identified can easily be redescribed in ways that dont make them seem like irrational biases at all; some are not transferable across different environments. The fundamental assumption of two discreet systems cannot be sustained.

But this does not mean we can disregard the propaganda initiatives derived from Kahneman and Tverskys work. Many of the persuasive techniques being employed in these efforts have been known intuitively for centuries. They have been used by governments, religions, and the arts.14 Now, however, these techniques are being extensively tested and combined with sophisticated data analysis. The two-systems view has managed to lend the appearance of legitimacy to techniques that might otherwise appear coercive. Experts, algorithms, and nudges may be presented as a form of collective rationality, assisted institutionally by markets and governments, stealthily undoing the knots of irrationality in which individuals have inevitably entangled themselves.

On this model, it appears that System Two, implemented from above, can liberate us from the flaws of System One. If we reject the distinction between these two supposedly separate psychological systems and instead pay attention to what can and cannot be rationally justified, it will be more evident that behavioral change imposed on us through nonrational means not only is more coercive than that which comes about through the rational evaluation of justifications, but also erodes our capacity to reflect rationally and critically on our social world. The sources of influence that shape social behavior, markets, and politics increasingly become invisible and rationally inscrutable.

Comparatively little attention has been paid to overcoming the biases that psychologists have identified, except insofar as this might serve the national security objective of discouraging extremism through the introduction of measures to combat effects such as confirmation bias.15 It is still possible to envisage behavioral science playing a part in the great social experiment of providing the kind of public education that nurtures the critical faculties of everyone in our society. But the pressures to exploit irrationalities rather than eliminate them are great and the chaos caused by competition to exploit them is perhaps already too intractable for us to rein in. In The Undoing Project, Lewis tells a story full of promise about the unraveling of obsolete assumptions. But Kahneman and Tverskys ideas have escaped the confines of their troubled friendship and we have yet to see how much will be undone.

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Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind | by Tamsin Shaw | The New ... - The New York Review of Books

EDWARDSVILLE The Southern Illinois University Edwardsville School of Education, Health and Human Behavior (SEHHB) is celebrating the continued professional achievements and proven leadership abilities of four alumni.

Edwardsville Community Unit District 7 Superintendent Lynda Andre has announced changes in leadership positions, including transitions to assistant principal and principal positions which involve SIUE alumni Tanya Patton, Andrew Gipson, Vince Schlueter and Julie Matarelli.

We are extremely proud of the many achievements and career advancements of our alumni, said Curt Lox, dean of the SEHHB. As educators and now administrators, these alumni are making a positive impact on the development of students across District 7. The School of Education, Health and Human Behavior has a rich history of preparing teachers and administrators, and it is great to see our community partners choosing our graduates to lead their schools.

Patton was named principal of Cassens Elementary School. She previously served as principal at Nelson Elementary School since 2005. Patton earned a masters in education administration in 2003, an education specialist degree in 2011 and a doctorate in educational leadership in 2014, all from SIUE.

Gipson, who earned a bachelors in music/music education from the SIUE College of Arts and Sciences in 2004, was named principal of Nelson Elementary School to replace Patton.

Schlueter was appointed assistant principal at Edwardsville High School. He has earned multiple degrees from SIUE including a bachelors in math studies in 1989, a masters in education administration in 2005, an education specialist degree in 2014, and a doctorate in educational leadership in 2016.

Matarelli earned a masters in education administration from SIUE in 2007. She was named principal at Columbus Elementary School.

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See more here:
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville alumni make advancements - Alton Telegraph

Third times a charm and our third annual Robo Madness conference in Boston had plenty of that. (So did the first two.) From live robot demos to provocative discussions on the opportunities and challenges in artificial intelligence, our speakers really delivered on this years theme: A.I. Gets Real.

Huge thanks to our host, Google, whose venue and support seem to get stronger every year. Special thanks to our event sponsors, who made it all possible: GE, Harmonic Drive, iRobot, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Cirtronics, and TriNet. And, of course, thanks to our speakers, attendees, and demo organizers, who are what the event is really about.

Also, a big shout-out to Keith Spiro Photography for the pictures above.

Now, on to a few takeaways from the day:

1. Self-driving vehicles are at peak hype. There are huge opportunities at stake, but some of the biggest problems have yet to be solved: data sharing, liability, urban infrastructure, accounting for human behavior. Not to mention the technology needs to improve. On the plus side, the money flowing into the sector will benefit robotics as a whole. And incremental advances will continue to boost vehicle safety.

2. Data ownership is the key issue in machine learning. Weve heard this before, but big companies access to datasee Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Teslagives them a huge leg up in A.I. applications. Theres not much new under the sun in terms of algorithms, so startups opportunities are largely determined by their datasets and team expertise.

3. Humans will need to communicate their goals to A.I. systems. In a world where machines can do more and more, people need to lay out guidelines for their behavior. This is especially important given that deep learning systems are getting harder for humans to understand and predict. Which leads to

4. Wed better think about jobs and ethics now. Robotics companies would rather address inefficiencies and labor shortages in fields like logistics, manufacturing, and delivery. But it seems likely that some (and perhaps many) human jobs will eventually become automated. How will business and policy leaders empower the human side of this evolving relationship? Stay tuned.

Xconomys Jeff Engel contributed to this report.

Gregory T. Huang is Xconomy's Deputy Editor, National IT Editor, and Editor of Xconomy Boston. E-mail him at gthuang [at] xconomy.com.

Gregory T. Huang is Xconomy's Deputy Editor, National IT Editor, and Editor of Xconomy Boston. E-mail him at gthuang [at] xconomy.com.

Originally posted here:
Robo Madness 2017: The Photos and Takeaways - Xconomy

By Charles "Al" Huth

There are people who want to forgive and cant. Others lack the desire to forgive the object of their grievance. Within the deep and long-held grievance is overwhelming emotional pain that has significantly impacted ones life.

In effect, this grievance becomes ones personal antagonist. This negative energy creates an obstacle for one to focus on their full potential possibilities. The pain of a deeply held grievance can be extremely difficult to overcome; therefore, forgiveness may be the only solution. It is easy to turn the lights on just flip the switch. But one cannot flip a magic switch and all is forgiven. However, there is a process one can entertain to forgive oneself and others. It takes a period of time to learn and absorb these steps, but the benefits are many.

The baby steps towards forgiveness include an understanding of the development of human interactions. If you can see that the general developmental pattern of human behavior applies to you as well as to others, then the door to forgiveness opens a little wider.

As a practical matter, hanging onto your grievance may be more harmful to you then to the object of your grievance. The person related to your grievance may not even be aware of your stress in this regard.

A proponent of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow, believed that everyone was born inherently good. However, when the path to their full potential was frustrated or blocked, they can become angry, fearful and/or destructive.

It is well known that we cannot walk in someone elses shoes. If one is dealing with someone who is demonstrating harmful behavior, empathy may be required. This is not to say that one should accept physical abuse. In general, most of our human behavior patterns were formed in childhood. Often these patterns of behavior and unique perspectives remain operative in adulthood.

In addition, acceptable behavior patterns in children may not be acceptable as a course of action in adults. As an extreme example: If one was told how much they were loved while somebody was beating on them, one would tend to have a strong, adverse reaction to the word love. Without knowing this persons background information, this extreme reaction would make little sense to others. Sometimes empathy is required when dealing with others that we do not know well. Making assumptions about others is a risky business. The chances of making a correct assumption may be less than 50 percent.

Most of us have regrets about our own past behavior. We relive past events and contemplate over and over again about what we could have done better. There are those who are less forgiving of themselves than of their family, friends and/or acquaintances. I believe that everyone strives to do the best that they can at their level of awareness. As humans, we strive to do better.

With lessons learned, our level of awareness increases our understanding of self and others. When we hang on to our past indiscretions and do not acknowledge our limited awareness at that time, we tend not to be forgiving of ourselves. Ultimately, this can be a heavy, unnecessary burden for us to carry around.

The act of forgiveness does not include condoning the actions of others. It is simply an acknowledgement that each of us has an awareness of our own reality.

Baby steps to forgiveness:

1) Recognize the impact of difficult situations on children raised in situations that are not conducive to becoming a well-adjusted adult.

2) Everyone is trying to do the best they can at their level of awareness. Everyone is not on identical levels of awareness.

3) Learn to forgive yourself. From birth to maturity, we are in a learning environment called the School of Life.

4) When situations are not completely understood, have empathy for others as well as yourself.

5) Accepting the concept of Oneness supports the idea that everyone is interconnected. Therefore, any thought or activity that separates us from others is conflicted with our natural way to be.

If you cant forgive yourself, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to forgive others!

Charles Al Huth, M.Ed., is the author of three books and numerous articles. He currently is teaching a class on human potential at OLLI/SOU. He lives in the Rogue Valley and is an inspirational speaker, teacher and magician. His website is http://JoyAl.org.

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Baby steps to forgiveness - Ashland Daily Tidings

We had been worrying about frogs frogs that went to vernal pools to mate that then got covered with snow.

In late February, when the weather was unseasonably warm, we had gotten a press release from the states Department of Environmental Conservation that usually comes in late March. We look forward to receiving it every year. For us, it epitomizes human beings trying to make amends to the natural world we have tampered with.

After the ground has thawed, wood frogs and spotted salamanders, among other species, come out from their underground winter shelters in the woods to get to pools to breed. In the past, weve covered big-night migrations where the roads seemed to undulate with the massive movement of amphibians.

Volunteers with the DECs Amphibian Migrations and Road Crossings Project not only record the weather conditions and count the amphibians, they help them safely cross the road, cautioning drivers and routing traffic around the well-traveled routes. The project is in its ninth year and so far 300 volunteers have helped more than 8,500 amphibians cross the road.

Earlier this month, after two feet of snow had fallen, we were interviewing Alvin Breisch about his new book, The Snake and the Salamander. For 26 years, until his retirement in 2009, Breisch was New York States amphibian and reptile specialist. He studied, catalogued, and worked to preserve the states herpetofauna its amphibians and reptiles, known as herps.

Who better to ask about our worries? We wondered if the frogs we had seen crossing our road to the pool on the other side that warm February night would be nipped in the bud like the cherry blossoms had been in Washington, D.C. this year.

Breisch told us, no it was the male frogs who had crossed to the pool and they would wait for the females.

Even with the snow? we asked.

Even with the snow, he said.

We spoke with Breisch about a wide variety of projects he has been involved with over the years to save species that otherwise would through human behavior become extinct.

Breisch was with the Endangered Species Unit and decided to use the same thought process for endangered reptiles and amphibians as the department used with game animals, setting bag limits.

For example, there were no regulations for the diamond-backed terrapin on Long Island, the only turtle that lives in brackish water. They were considered good eating; there were no regulations, recalled Breisch. He said that 10,000 to 20,000 were sold each year in New York Citys Fulton Fish Market.

We drafted regulations to limit harvest to have a self-sustaining population, said Breisch. It worked for years.

Currently, Breisch is working with a group of scientists on a Timber Rattlesnake Conservation Action Plan, documenting the current and historic range of the snake from Quebec to Texas and Florida and as far west as Minnesota. The area covers two Canadian provinces and 30-odd states. Breisch is a co-author for the New York State portion and editor for the entire work.

We saw inconsistent ways states were managing the snakes, he said of the reason for undertaking the project. He gave an example that he termed indescribably awful: Texas has rattlesnake roundups, so-called celebrations, where people collect live snakes, and use them for side-show type things, like hand-milking snakes or holding bagging contests.

This involves contestants entering a pit full of snakes and throwing them into bags. Its not good for the snakes and its not good for the people, he said. People get bitten and die. Most of the snakes die.

There are no timber rattlesnakes left in Canada, Breisch said, and Ontario is looking to see if the snakes might be reintroduced.

We asked why anyone would want to re-introduce a venomous snake, and Breisch replied, Its a movement among virtually all naturalists wed like to see a complete suite of different animals...Were looking for high biodiversity.

He went on, The health of the environment is better if you have a significant number of native species. Returning to the timber rattlesnake, as an example, he explained that they eat small rodents. Rodents do crop damage and tree damage; they carry black-legged ticks that carry Lyme disease.

Breisch had suffered, as had we, from another tick-borne disease, one that can be fatal, anaplasmosis, so that connection hit home.

During a podcast, Breisch gave us another example of an animal considered harmful being reintroduced into its native habitat: The wolf, absent for decades, was reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. The thought was that wolves would help keep the overpopulation of deer, moose, and elk in check.

Follow-up studies showed that had happened as expected, Breisch said, but there was an unexpected impact on vegetation. The banks had been de-vegetated by the elk. With the wolves keeping the elk population under natural control, the streams became healthy again, he said

Humans have great hubris. The wilderness that our pioneer ancestors tamed now has to be re-invented and protected.

Each species is unique, said Breisch. We havent gotten to the point we understand that uniqueness.

He gave a practical example of the Massasauga rattlesnake from which a vaccination was developed in the 1800s, used as a model for vaccinations for other diseases.

But beyond the direct benefit of certain species to humans and our livestock, there are connections in the natural world that we have destroyed or are destroying that we dont understand.

Sure, we were relieved to learn that the male frogs are waiting patiently beneath the snow for their female mates to arrive. But we went on to reflect how odd it was that we should worry about a few frogs we had blithely seen hopping across our road that warm February night but not the enormity of all we as human beings had done to disturb the natural order weve stayed warm these cold spring nights in our home heated with oil. Each day we drive to work in our car fueled with gasoline.

We know these fossil fuels are destroying our planet and may even be causing the erratic weather we are right now experiencing, and yet we go on, taking the path most familiar to us.

In the same way we trusted Al Breisch, as a qualified scientist, to quell our fears about the frogs, we trust the vast majority of scientists who have studied climate change and determined that humans are affecting it.

Were grateful we live in New York State that is moving forward with, even as the federal government is starting to peel back, programs that promote renewable energy.

While we commend the citizens who stand in the rain to help the amphibians cross the road, we urge still greater commitment to reduce the human footprint upon our Earth.

Melissa Hale-Spencer

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The road to recovery means taking care of species besides just humans - The Altamont Enterprise

From research on stem cells and DNA sequencing to experiments with fruit flies and surveys of human behavior, projects funded by the National Institutes of Health aim to make Americans healthier. A new analysis finds that NIH-funded research also fuels the kinds of innovations that drive the U.S. economy.

Between 1990 and 2012, close to 1 in 10 projects made possible by an NIH grant resulted in a patent, usually for a university or a hospital.

The indirect effects were far greater: Close to 1 in 3 NIH research grants generated work that was cited in applications for commercial patents.

Over roughly two decades, 81,462 patents filed by companies and individuals cited at least one NIH-sponsored research project in their applications. Some 1,351 of those patents were for drugs that would go on to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, undergirds a point repeated frequently since the Trump administration unveiled a budget plan that proposed cutting the NIH budget by 20% in 2018: that research funded by taxpayer dollars not only improves lives and forestalls death, it creates jobs which the president has long asserted is his highest priority.

It is an argument often made in support of such scientific undertakings as space exploration, and sometimes for defense spending. But when it comes to biomedical research, public spending is frequently dismissed as a way to sustain university professors or seek esoteric answers to the mysteries of life.

It shouldnt be, said Pierre Azoulay, a professor of technological innovation at MIT and coauthor of the new analysis.

NIH public funding expenditures have large effects on the patenting output of the private sector, Azoulay said. These results should give a lot of pause to those who think these cuts are going to have no effect.

Ashley J. Stevens, a biotechnology researcher who is president of Focus IP Group in Winchester, Mass., said the new study clearly ... supports the premise that increased investment in the NIH leads directly to improved public health.

It also makes President Trumps proposal to cut the NIH budget by $1.6 billion this year and $6 billion next year to fund a border wall and increased military spending incompatible with his America first objectives, added Stevens, who was not involved in the study.

More than 80% of the NIH budget is parceled out to researchers across the country and around the world. Each year, NIHs 21 institutes award close to 50,000 competitive grants to investigators at more than 2,500 universities, independent labs and private companies. The University of California, for instance, received nearly $1.9 billion in total NIH funding last year.

Led by Harvard Business School entrepreneurship professor Danielle Li, the new research scoured 1,310,700 patent applications submitted between 1980 and 2012 in the life sciences, a category that includes drugs, medical devices and related technologies. In the footnotes, citations and supporting data, the study authors looked for references to any of the 365,380 grants the NIH funded between 1980 and 2007, as well as to research articles generated by those grants.

To capture the unappreciated indirect spillovers of knowledge that result from NIH-funded work, the authors focused especially on 232,276 private-sector patents in the life sciences.

Li, Azoulay and Bhaven Sampat, a health policy professor at Columbia University, found 17,093 patents that were assigned to universities and public-sector institutions. These patents are certainly valuable they can spur further research, support professors and graduate students and boost endowments.

But private-sector patents may reverberate more widely through the economy, generating capital, manufacturing jobs and profits. And their intellectual debt to publicly funded research is rarely counted or acknowledged outside the fine print of these patent applications.

In all, 112,408 NIH-funded research grants 31% of the total disbursed between 1990 and 2007 produced research that was cited by 81,462 private-sector patents, the team found.

If you thought this was just ivory tower stuff that has no relevance, I think we contradict that, Azoulay said.

The findings demonstrate that the broad economic effects of NIH budget cuts would not necessarily be felt immediately, since it could take years for a research paper written by NIH-funded investigators to find its way into a patent application.

These effects are going to be delayed, Azoulay said. The slowdown resulting from a cut in the NIH budget now is for President Ivanka Trump or President Chelsea Clinton to worry about.

But the study also makes clear that publicly funded research lays the groundwork for important innovations and discoveries that companies and individuals seek to patent.

Biomedical research is perhaps the most complex type of research there is, Azoulay added: These are fundamentally harder problems. There are a lot of blind alleys, experimentation that leads to nothing.

Intriguingly, the new research found that there was little difference in the economic impact of grants for basic science and applied science. Both types of grants were equally likely to be cited in patent applications if they explored fundamental dynamics of biology (such as cellular processes) or if they studied specific disease states in humans.

That distinction is important, because researchers and scientific leaders have quarreled for years over how NIHs limited budgets should be apportioned.

Scientists who study very basic biological processes, or who work with simple organisms like yeast, earthworms or fruit flies, often argue that their contributions are most valuable because they shed light on how all life including human life works.

Scientists whose research is more applied, including clinical trials and epidemiological studies, believe their work contributes more directly to improving human health.

The new study suggests that both categories contribute to commercial innovation.

Stevens called this finding remarkable.

Azoulay acknowledged that neither the progress of life sciences research nor its contribution to the economy is neat or easy to quantify.

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Drastic cuts to NIH budget could translate to less innovation and fewer patents, study argues - Los Angeles Times

When humans began erecting permanent settlements around 15,000 years ago, the practice had an effect on local animal populations and new research says the common mouse was one of them.

Led by an international group of scientists, the recently published study looked into the link between how humans at the dawn of the agricultural age changed the ecological balance of the world around them. Even before the advent of agriculture, the Middle East became the site of many much more permanent homes, and researchers say these earliest permanent edifices led to the flourishing and proliferation of the common house mouse.

Washington University in St. Louis anthropology professor Fiona Marshall, a co-author on the study and an expert on animal domestication, says that the new research provides the first evidence that humans impacted local animal communities as early as 15,000 years ago. The direct result is the dominant presence of house mice she added, remarking that these settlements had major implications for human societies, animal domestication and local ecologies.

In a university press release, Professor Marshall characterized the new research as exciting because it showed how the environment was shaped not by farmers but even earlier by settled hunter-gatherers. House mice began to flourish thanks to these hunter-gatherers providing stable access to human shelter and food. The result, Prof. Marshall says, is commensalism an early form of domestication that teaches species the benefits of interacting with humans.

Broad implications are raised by these findings. The timeline for the roots of animal domestication could be pushed back thousands of years prior to the widely accepted dawn of agriculture that occurred between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago.

The study itself was undertaken to better understand what caused large differences in the ratio of house mice and wild mice discovered in archaeological digs at ancient hunter-gatherer sites in Israel. Researchers used differences in fossilized mouse teeth, some as ancient as 200,000 years old, to trace species-related variations over the millennia, resulting in the construction of a timeline of how different mice population numbers changed over the years the site was occupied by humans.

Human mobility changed the relationships between two specific mouse breeds the short-tailed field mouse and the house mouse. Both of these mice species are still alive today in and around Israels modern settlements.

The most telling evidence of how mice populations were influenced by human behavior is how they rose and fell in correlation with human populations. Local hunter-gatherers who stayed in the same location for extended periods of time created conditions that saw the house mouse population flourish; these populations would then diminish when the human periodically moved on.

In the absence of humans, the house mouse and the field mouse populations achieved equilibrium. When humans were present for long periods of time, the house mice were able to outcompete their evolutionary cousins, pushing the majority of them outside these settlements.

The new research study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, can be found here

Image courtesy of Lior Weissbrod

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Proliferation of Common Mouse Linked to Human Settlement - New Historian

In BriefThe immediate need for basic income in recognition of theeffects of chronic stress and the importance of improvingenvironments. Eliminating huge stressors like worrying about beingable to afford food and shelter can do wonders for the potential ofhumanity. Biological Case for UBI

At the end of 2015, after a year-long journey, I achieved the realization of an idea with the help of about 140 people that has already forever changed the way I look at the very foundations or lack thereof upon which all of society is based. I now firmly believe we have the potential through its universal adoption to systemically transform society for the better, even more so than many of those most familiar with the idea have long postulatedbecause, for me, the idea is no longer just an idea. Its not theory. It is part of my life. Its real. And the effects are undeniable for someone actually living with it.

The idea of which I speak goes by the name of basic income but is best understood not by name, but by function, and that function is simply to provide a monthly universal starting point located above the poverty line as a new secure foundation for existence. Its an irrevocable stipend for life. In the U.S. it would be something like $1,000 for every citizen every month. All other income would then be earned as additional income on top of it so that employment would always pay more than unemployment.

This may sound overly expensive, but it would save far more than it costs. It would also really only require an additional net transfer of around $900 billion, and thats without subtracting the existing welfare programs it could replace, and also without simplifying the tax code through the replacement of all the many credits, deductions, and subsidies it could also replace. Basically, were already handing out money to everyone, rich and poor alike, but in hundreds of different ways through thousands of government middlemen who only serve to disincentivize employment by removing government supports as a reward for working.

Odds are this idea is new to you, but its not a new idea. Its been considered for hundreds of years from as long ago in the U.S. by founding father Thomas Paine in the 18th century, to Richard Nixon, Martin Luther King, Jr., and free market-loving Milton Friedman in the 20th century, to a quickly growing list of new names here in the 21st century. Its advocates know no ideological lines. Supporters include Nobel prize-winning economists, libertarians, progressives, conservatives, climate change activists, tax reformers, feminists, anarchists, doctors, human rights defenders, racial justice leaders, and the list goes on.

For such an old idea thats been endorsed by so many for so long and yet has obviously never yet come to be, you may be thinking, Why now? The answer to such a question has economic reasoning rooted in the globalization of labor and the exponential advancement of technologies capable of entirely replacing labor, but as important as this particular discussion is to have, its centered more around the idea of a future problem and less a present one.

However, our problems are very much in the present and to see why, we need to go deeper, much deeper, beyond technology and economics, and into human biology itself. To do that, well first need to look at what we as humans have learned from some animals in the lab and in the wild, because I think doing so pulls back the curtain on our entire social system.

As is true with many scientific discoveries, they tend to be accidental, and the story of Martin Seligman and some dogs back in 1965 is no different. Seligman wanted to know if dogs could be classically conditioned to react to bells in the same way as if theyd just been shocked, so he put them in a crate with a floor that could be electrified, and shocked them each time he rang a bell. The dogs soon began to react to the bell as if theyd just been shocked. Next however, he put them in a special crate where they could leap to safety to avoid the shock, and this is where the surprise happened.

The dogs wouldnt leap to safety. It turns out theyd learned from the prior part of the experiment that it didnt matter what they did. The shock would come anyway. They had learned helplessness. Seligman then tried the experiment with dogs who had not been shocked and they leaped to safety just as expected. But the dogs who had learned helplessness, they just sadly laid down and whimpered.

Fast forward to 1971 where a scientist named Jay Weiss explored this further with rats in cages. He put three rats into three different cages with electrodes attached to their tails and a wheel for each to turn. One rat was the lucky rat. No shocks were involved. Another would get shocks that could be stopped by turning its wheel. The third was the unlucky one. It would get shocked at the same time as the second rat, but it could do nothing about it. The third rat would only stop getting shocked when the second rat turned its wheel. Can you guess what happened?

Even though the two rats that were shocked got shocked at the same time and for the same duration of time, their outcomes were very different. The rat who had the power to stop the pain was just a bit worse off than the rat who experienced no pain at all. However, the rat who had no control whatsoever, stuck with a lever that did nothing, became heavily ulcerated. Like the dog, it too had learned helplessness. The cost of this lesson was its health.

Of course, humans are not dogs or rats. Theres a bit more complexity when it comes to us and our physiological responses. For us, perception is a key factor. This is where something called attribution comes into play, of which there are three important kinds that lead to humans learning helplessness: internal, stable, and global.

Think back to when you first started school and try to remember your first math test. What if after taking that first test you did poorly on it, and instead of all the other possible reasons for why that could happen, you decided it was because you sucked at math? Thats an internal attribution. Now imagine you applied that attribution to all math tests. Thats a stable attribution. Its not a one-time thing. Now imagine you applied it beyond math to all classes. Thats a global attribution. Consider the results of such perceptions.

Maybe that first math test was simply too hard for everyone in the class. Maybe it wasnt just you. Maybe your poor grade was due to not studying hard enough, or because you were too hungry or too tired. But instead, because you decided it was your fault and it meant you were stupid, your entire life went down a different path. Even though at any point along the way, you could have escaped that path, just like Seligmans dogs could have escaped the shocks, what if you had learned helplessness from that first math test?

We can learn to be helpless in an environment that actually offers us control, and the feeling itself of control can be the difference between a life full of unending stress, and a relatively stress-free life.

Its even been shown that we only need to be told theres nothing we can do in order for us to feel theres no point in trying. Its like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Tell everyone theres no point in voting, and fewer people will vote.

What all of this shows is two-fold and extremely important to remember. We can learn to be helpless in an environment that actually offers us control, and the feeling itself of control can be the difference between a life full of unending stress, and a relatively stress-free life.

Stress is more than a feeling. Stress is a physiological response, and it has important evolutionary reasons for being. Back in the day, many thousands of years ago, our ancestors who could shift into a kind of emergency gear where long-term higher-order creative thinking shut down, and the body was enabled to think faster, react quicker, be stronger, move faster, run longer, and think only about survival those were the humans who survived.

We call this now the fight-or-flight response, and where this once incredibly important response was evolutionarily adaptive, it is now maladaptive. We dont live in that same world anymore where it made so much sense. We arent being chased down by lions or being eaten by wolves while sitting in front of our computers in our air-conditioned offices, and yet our fight-or-flight responses are still being activated. In fact, for far too many, daily existence is nothing but fight-or-flight. Long-term stress is a real problem, and I would argue, its not just a health problem. Its a problem for human civilization.

One of the most knowledgeable scientists in the world in this area is Robert Sapolsky, a pioneering neuroendocrinologist and professor at Stanford University who has spent more than thirty years studying the effects of stress on health, of which there are many. Over the years, Sapolsky has found that long-term stress increases ones risk of diabetes, cardiac problems, and gastrointestinal disorders. Stress suppresses the immune system. It causes reproductive dysfunction in men and women. It suppresses growth in kids. In affects developing fetuses. Newer evidence even shows it causes faster aging of DNA. But potentially worst of all is what it does to the human mind.

Prolonging fight-or-flight into a chronic condition means that neurons in the brain related to things like learning, memory, and judgment all suffer the consequences thanks to the wide-ranging effects of our double-edged sword stress hormones called glucocorticoids. Recent research has even shown this response made chronic is a self-perpetuating cycle. A constantly stressed out brain appears to lead to a kind of hardening of neural pathways. Essentially, feeling chronic stress makes it harder to not perceive stress, creating a vicious cycle of unending stress.

On top of this, and related back to Weisss rats and human attribution theory, is the coping responses of those who are stressed out. Think of the off-lever in the second rats cage. There are many such levers around us and although they can be effective in reducing our stress levels, many of them are arguably pretty bad off-switches. These responses include acting out against others, otherwise known as displacement aggression or bullying.

Yes, bullying is an effective coping mechanism. As the saying goes, shit rolls downhill, and theres actually a scientific reason for that other than gravity. In a hierarchy, it is healthier after a loss to start another fight with someone you can beat, than to mope about the loss. The former is the abdication of control, a form of learned helplessness, and the latter is the creation of control, a kind of learned aggressiveness.

A society full of unhealthy people getting sick more than they otherwise would be, saddled with difficulties learning and remembering, suffering from weakened judgment and short-term survival thinking, and violently turning on each other as a means of coping is not a recipe for success. Its a recipe for disaster.

Life in the 21st century is full of both. On the learned helplessness side, there have been an estimated 45,000 suicides per year since 2000, with a sharp rise since 2007, that can all be attributed to the stresses surrounding the economic insecurities of unemployment and underemployment. The U.S. is even confounding the world, with a mysterious and dramatic rise in mortality rates among middle-aged white men and women, who all appear to be drinking and overdosing themselves to death.

On the displacement aggression side, we see bullying of traditionally marginalized groups and a global and marked increase of anti-immigrant sentiment which has already led directly to the election of Donald Trump and as a result, cries for border walls and travel bans. We are seeing a rise in authoritarianism, which is fundamentally a cry for more control and predictability.

A society full of unhealthy people getting sick more than they otherwise would be, saddled with difficulties learning and remembering, suffering from weakened judgment and short-term survival thinking, and violently turning on each other as a means of coping is not a recipe for success. Its a recipe for disaster, especially faced with species-endangering challenges like climate change that demand long-term thinking. But there is hope, and that hope springs from the same well as our problems.

There is an animal out there, one of our cousins actually in the primate family, who lead somewhat similar lives to us. They are high enough in the food chain to generally not be bothered and smart enough to be the primary cause of each others problems. Or as Sapolsky has described it: Theyre just like us: Theyre not getting done in by predators and famines, theyre getting done in by each other. That animal is the baboon and its the animal Sapolsky has been studying for decades. In doing so, hes found three primary factors in predicting stress levels.

The first predictor is the social hierarchy itself. Those at the top tend to live the most stress-free lives thanks to having more control, and those at the bottom tend to live the most stressful lives, thanks to having less control. There is however an important caveat to this. The stability of the social hierarchy matters. If the top baboon faces what is effectively a baboon revolution, that can be pretty stressful. In other words, more unequal societies lead to more stress, for everyone.

The second primary factor is personality. Just as primates are smart enough to be stressed where other animals wouldnt, theyre also able to not be stressed where others would. A baboon who worries for his life every time another baboon walks by is going to be far more full of stress hormones than a laid-back baboon. Personality is therefore a factor that can override ones position in the hierarchy for better or worse. It can even strongly predict ones rank.

The third primary factor actually trumps all. It turns out that stress-related diseases are powerfully grounded in social connectedness. At the bottom of the social hierarchy and prone to stressing out based on your personality? That can still be okay for your health and well-being as long as you have strong social supports friends, family, and community to override it all. Sometimes all we really need is to know we are not alone.

This social trump card even helps explain the prevalence of religion in human societies. Its the creation of a perceived control lever that reduces stress across all factors including the all important social support factor. The result is that attending religious services regularly is actually surprisingly good for human health.

All of this goes a long way toward explaining a great deal of human behavior. The construction of a social hierarchy is a naturally emergent phenomenon of our biology. Being above someone else in rank offers a level of control and predictability. Our personalities help determine our ranks and also how we cope with a lack of control and predictability. Our social relationships help put our lives and the world around us into perspective. However, this is no meritocracy and much depends on the circumstances of birth.

Because our personalities are greatly determined by our environments, especially as kids, a positive feedback loop can emerge where those born and raised in high stress environments full of impoverishment and inequality are unable to escape those environments. This can then become self-perpetuating through each successive generation that follows. We see this happening right now. For all those born into the bottom fifth of American society, about half remain there as adults. The same is true for the top fifth. Meanwhile, the middle 60% are twice as mobile as either one. If we care about the American Dream, we should consider the implications.

Whats the result of such generational stratification of little social mobility? One need look no further than our coping mechanisms the levers of control we create to understand why so many things we dont want, emerge from highly unequal societies. Remember displacement aggression? A 1990 study of 50 countries concluded economic inequality is so significantly related to rates of homicide despite an extensive list of conceptually relevant controls, that a decrease in income inequality of 0.01 Gini (a measure of inequality) leads to 12.7 fewer homicides per 100,000 individuals. Simply put, and this is a robust finding, growing inequality leads to growing violence. A meta-analysis of 34 separate studies even found 97% of the correlations reported between social inequality and violent crime to be positive, meaning as one got bigger or smaller, the other got bigger or smaller.

Addictions are another result. Drug use is a lever of control that is also an escape. We may not be able to control anything around us, but we can control an entirely personal decision that is as simple as drinking that vodka or smoking that cigarette. It can function as the middle finger to everything and everyone around us as a way of saying, I may be stuck in this cage, but you cant stop me from using this to feel like Ive escaped, if only temporarily, and if even only an illusion. This is me controlling the one thing I can control myself. Consider again the mysteriously growing mortality rates of middle-aged white people due to overdoses and liver disease.

As economic inequality increases, other scientifically correlated effects include: reduced trust and civic engagement, eroded social cohesion, higher infant mortality rates, lower overall life expectancy, more mental illness, reduced educational outcomes, higher rates of imprisonment, increased teen pregnancy rates, greater rates of obesity, and the list continues to grow as inequality-related research grows.

Additionally, if you look closely at such a list of effects, it shows the erosion of social supports. If you are less likely to trust your neighbor, if you arent as involved in your community, if you or those you interact with are more aggressive, if you are depressed and just want to be alone, that means the all important trump card for handling stress social connectedness vanishes. This too is its own feedback loop. Less social connection means more stress which means less social connection. Its an unending cycle for human misery.

Its also exactly what weve been observing in the United States for decades. Robert Putnam wrote an entire book about it back in 2000 titled Bowling Alone. The title originated from the statistic that although more people are bowling, less people are doing it in leagues. As observed by Putnam:

Community and equality are mutually reinforcing Social capital and economic inequality moved in tandem through most of the twentieth century. In terms of the distribution of wealth and income, America in the 1950s and 1960s was more egalitarian than it had been in more than a century Those same decades were also the high point of social connectedness and civic engagement. Record highs in equality and social capital coincided. Conversely, the last third of the twentieth century was a time of growing inequality and eroding social capital The timing of the two trends is striking: somewhere around 196570 America reversed course and started becoming both less just economically and less well connected socially and politically.

Viewed through Sapolskys decades of scientific investigation into the physiology of stress, and backed by everything weve observed since theGreat Decoupling in 1973 where national productivity has continued to grow but wage growth has been non-existent, it becomes disappointingly clear that all of this is actually of our own making. Through the policy decisions weve made to increase inequality in the blind pursuit of unlimited growth through the cutting of taxes and subsidizing of multi-national corporate interests, and through the pursuit of globalization without regard for its effects on the middle classes of developed nations such that 70% of households in 25 advanced economies saw their earnings drop in the past decade, weve created a societal feedback loop for chronic stress. And were paying the price.

But it doesnt have to be this way. Just as we know more about why things are the way they are because of some rats in cages and some baboons in East Africa, those same animals point the way forward.

In what was a sad day for Sapolsky but a remarkable day for science, he discovered back in the mid-1980s that the very first baboon troop hed ever studied had experienced a die-off. Half of the troops males had died of tuberculosis from eating tainted garbage. Because those at the top did not allow weaker males and any of the females to eat their prize trash, all of them died. The result was a truly transformed society of baboons.

A greater sense of egalitarianism became the new rule of the jungle, so to speak. Bullying of females and lower males became a rarity, replaced with aggression limited to those of close social rank. Aggressive behaviors like biting were reduced while affectionate behaviors like mutual grooming were increased. The baboons got closer, literally. They sat closer to each other. Stress plummeted, even among those at the very bottom of the new hierarchy. Even more amazingly, this happier more peaceful society of baboons has lasted over the decades, despite members leaving and joining.

In what appears to be a transmission of societal values, new baboons are taught that in this particular society, bullying is not tolerated and tolerance is more the general rule, not the exception. Essentially, a new feedback loop was created, where the sudden reduction in inequality led to less stress and greater community, which led to a new normal of less stress and greater community. As Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University put it in a 2004 interview with the New York Times about the baboon findings, The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained.

As much as the story of these baboons have to reveal about the importance and the hope of a less stressed-out, more peaceful society, there is another animal story that in my opinion shows the most potential for mankind of all.

In what has become a very well-known and discussed kind of study, rats were put into cages and given the opportunity to press a lever to self-administer drugs like cocaine. They medicated themselves to death and thus went down in history as the kind of experiment to point to that reveals the helplessly addictive dangers of drugs and how we must be protected from their usage for our own good. This is the ammunition for the War on Drugs in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, in what has become a far too little known variation of this study, but I consider to be one of the most important ever devised, a new kind of experiment was run in an entirely different environment called Rat Park.

Hypothesizing that perhaps having nothing to do but just exist alone in a cage may have something to do with drug usage, a psychologist namedBruce Alexander decided to create a kind of rat heaven before offering rats drugs. Instead of a cage, rats were given a huge space to roam between tree-painted walls and a forest-like floor, full of toys and other rats to play and mate with, food to eat, obstacles to climb, tunnels to traverse, etc.

Within this paradise for rats, morphine-laced water was introduced. The rats could drink as much of it as they wanted. Incredibly, the rats didnt care for it, opting for plain water instead. The morphine-water was then made sweeter and sweeter until eventually the rats finally drank it, but only because it apparently tasted so good, not for the narcotic effects. This was even confirmed by adding a drug to the water, Naltrexone, that nullified the effects of the morphine, which resulted in the rats drinking more of the water. All of this was in strong contrast to solitary rats in cages given the same choices, who took to the morphine-water immediately and strongly.

In fact, its even been found that solitary existence within a cage actively prevents neurogenesis the growth of new neurons within the brain. It turns out neuroscientists for decades thought it impossible for adults to grow new neurons because they were studying solitary animals in cages the whole time. Its therefore only recently that weve learned that impoverished environments actively limit brain development.

Building a paradise for humans is up to us, where because everyone has enough, and inequality is low enough, we wont reach for those levers of control that end up being against our better interests.

What this all reveals is more than the great lie of the Drug War. It reveals the vast importance and great differences of living alone in a cage, and living in a world of abundance and social bonds. Viewed in the context of everything else discussed, it shows the importance of constructing an environment for the purpose of bringing out the best in us, instead of the worst in us. Building a paradise for humans is up to us, where because everyone has enough, and inequality is low enough, we wont reach for those levers of control that end up being against our better interests. So how do we build Human Park?

It is only in my studies of the idea of basic income that Ive seen glimpses into this idea of a Human Park. Like a bunch of puzzle pieces that can be collected to form into a picture, the evidence behind simply giving people money without strings forms a profound image of a better world that can exist right now, if we so choose. Remember the three primary factors that determine our levels of stress?

Creating a less unequal society is step one. There exists in the world today, and has since 1982, something as close to a fully universal basic income as anything yet devised. Its the annual Alaska dividend where thanks to every resident receiving a check for on average around $1,000 per year for nothing but residing in Alaska, inequality is consistently among the lowest of all states. Not only that, but we see what wed expect to see in lower stress populations, where Alaska is also consistently among the happiest states.

In Gallups 2015 ranking of states by well-being, Alaska was second only to Hawaii. This annual ranking is a combined measure of five separate rankings: purpose (liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals), social (having supportive relationships and love in your life), financial (managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security), community (liking where you live, feeling safe and having pride in your community), and physical (having good health and enough energy to get things done daily). Alaska scored 5th, 5th, 1st, 7th, and 6th respectively in each of these measures.

In other words, in the only state in the U.S. to provide a minimum amount of income to all residents every year, such that no one ever need worry about having nothing, they feel the greatest amount of basic economic security and the least amount of stress than any other state. As a result theyre also among the most motivated, the healthiest, and have strong family, friend, and community social supports. Alaska is essentially a glimpse at Human Park, but only a glimpse because even the $2,100 they all received in 2015 is not enough to cover a years worth of basic human needs.

Some more of the best evidence we have in the world for what happens in the long-term when people are provided something that looks even more like a basic income than is found in Alaska, can again be found in the U.S., in North Carolina.

In 1992, the Great Smoky Mountains Study of Youth began with the goal of studying the youth in North Carolina to determine the possible risk factors of developing emotional and behavioral disorders. Because Native Americans tend to be underrepresented in mental health research, researchers made the point of including 349 child members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. About halfway into the ten-year study, something that is the dream of practically any researcher happened as a matter of pure serendipity. All tribal members began receiving a share of casino profits. By 2001 those dividends had grown to $6,000 per year. By 2006, they were $9,000 per year. The results were nothing short of incredible.

The number of Cherokee living in poverty declined by 50%. Behavioral problems declined by 40%. Crime rates decreased. High school graduation rates increased. Grades improved. Home environments were transformed. Drug and alcohol use declined. Additionally, the lower the age the children were freed of poverty, the greater the effects as they grew up, to the point the youngest ended up being a third less likely to develop substance abuse or psychiatric problems as teens.Randall Akee, an economist, later even calculated that the savings generated through all the societal improvements actually exceeded the amounts of the dividends themselves.

However, the most powerful finding of all was in personality effects. These changes were observed as a result of better home environments that involved less stress and better parental relationships. Incredibly, the children of families who began receiving what we can call something very close to a basic income, saw long-term enhancements in two key personality traits: conscientiousness and agreeableness. That is, they grew up to be more honest, more observant, more comfortable around other people, and more willing to work together with others. And because personalities tend to permanently set as adults, these are most likely lifelong changes.

If we remember how important personality is to the perception of stress and ones location within social hierarchies, these children will end up far better off, and as a result, their own children likely will as well. This is another glimpse into a basic income-enabled Human Park.

Although whats been happening for years in both Alaska and North Carolina are close to universal basic income in practice, they are not actually UBI. UBI requires regularly giving everyone in an entire community an amount of money sufficient to cover their basic needs. This has been done in three places so far: the city of Dauphin in Canada, the Otjivero-Omitara area of Namibia, and the Madhya Pradesh area of India.

Its in these areas that humanity has achieved whats closest to creating Human Parks. As a direct result of guaranteeing everyone a basic income in Dauphin, hospitalization rates decreased 8.5% and high school graduation rates surpassed 100% as dropouts actually returned to school to finish. In Namibia, overall crime rates were cut almost in half and self-employment rates tripled. In India, housing and nutrition improved, markets and businesses blossomed, and overall health and well-being reached new heights. But if its one thing I find most interesting across all experiments, its the improved social cohesion a proliferation of new and strengthened social supports.

In Namibia, a stronger community spirit developed. Apparently, the need to ask each other for money was a barrier to normal human interaction. Once basic income made it so that no one needed to beg anymore, everyone felt more able to make friendly visits to each other, and speak more freely without being seen as wanting something in return. In India, where castes can still create artificial social divisions, those in villages given basic income actually began to gather across caste lines for mutual decision-making. And in Canada, the basic income guarantee had a notable impact on caring, with parents choosing to spend more time with their kids, and kids spending more time with each other in schools instead of jobs.

Remember, social supports are the trump card of societies with less stress, and it appears that providing people with UBI strengthens existing social supports and creates new ones. Freed from a focus on mere survival, humans reach out to each other. This is also something that makes us different from every other animal on Earth our ability to reach each other in ways unimaginable even to ourselves until only recently. We as humans are entirely unique in our ability to belong to multiple hierarchies, and through the internet create connections across vast distances and even time itself through recorded knowledge.

Our place in a hierarchy matters, but we can decide which hierarchies matter more. Is it our position in the socioeconomic ladder? Is it our position in our place of employment? Or is it our position in our churches, our schools, our sports leagues, our online communities, or even our virtual communities within games like World of Warcraft and Second Life?

No other policy has the transformative potential of reducing anywhere near as much stress in society than the lifelong guaranteeing of basic economic security with a fully unconditional basicincome.

We as humans have incredible potential to create and form communities, and realize world-changing feats of imagination, and this mostly untapped potential mostly just requires less stress and more time. If all were doing is just trying to get by, and our lives are becoming increasingly stressful, it becomes increasingly difficult to think and to connect with each other. Its the taxation of the human mind and social bonds. Studies even show the burden of poverty on the mind depletes the amount of mental bandwidth available for everything else to the tune of about 14 IQ points, or the loss of an entire nights sleep. Basically, scarcity begets scarcity.

On the other hand, if we free ourselves to focus on everything else other than survival, if we remove the limitations of highly unequal and impoverished environments, then were increasingly able to connect with each other, and we minimize learned helplessness. As a result, our health improves. Crime is reduced. Self-motivation goes up. Teamwork overtakes dog-eat-dog, and long-term planning overtakes short-term thinking. Presumably, many an IQ jumps the equivalent of 14 points. A greater sense of security has even been shown to reduce bias against out groups, from immigrants to the obese. And if we take into account the importance of security in people deciding to invest their time and resources in bold new ventures, innovation also has the chance of skyrocketing in a society where everyone always has enough to feel comfortable in taking risks without fear of failure. Basically, abundance begets abundance.

If what we seek is a better environment for the thriving of humans a Human Park full of greater health and happiness then what we seek should be the implementation of basic income, in nation after nation, all over the world. There is no real feeling of control without the ability to say no. Because UBI is unconditional, it provides that lever to everyone for the first time in history. No other policy has the transformative potential of reducing anywhere near as much stress in society than the lifelong guaranteeing of basic economic security with a fully unconditional basic income. Plus, with that guarantee achieved, the fear of technological unemployment becomes the goal of technological unemployment. Why stress about automation, when we could embrace it?

No more fight-or-flight.

Its time for live long and prosper.

Read more:
Evidence Indicates That Universal Basic Income Improves Human Health - Futurism

The quality of public discourse online is not going to get better and may actually get worse over the next decade, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center that invited 8,000 technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders to respond.

Forty-two percent of the 1,537 participants said they anticipate no major change in levels of online trolling and other harmful behavior that is found online. Another 39 percent said the next decade will be more shaped by these types of online behaviors.

While respondents expressed a range of opinions from deep concern to disappointment to resignation to optimism, most agreed that people at their best and their worst are empowered by networked communication technologies, the studys authors wrote. Some said the flame wars and strategic manipulation of the zeitgeist might just be getting started if technological and human solutions are not put in place to bolster diverse civil discourse.

Pew and Elon Universitys Imagining the Internet Center conducted the survey between July 1 and August 12, 2016, before the height of the divisive U.S. election.

The report categorizes responses into four primary themes that outline what the future of online discourse might hold:

Many respondents think things will just get worse as humans continue to evolve to a relatively new medium.

I would very much love to believe that discourse will improve over the next decade, but I fear the forces making it worse havent played out at all yet, technology consultant Jerry Michalski said. After all, it took us almost 70 years to mandate seatbelts. And were not uniformly wise about how to conduct dependable online conversations, never mind debates on difficult subjects. In that long arc of history that bends toward justice, particularly given our accelerated times, I do think we figure this out. But not within the decade.

We see a dark current of people who equate free speech with the right to say anything, even hate speech, even speech that does not sync with respected research findings, an anonymous MIT professor said. They find in unmediated technology a place where their opinions can have a multiplier effect, where they become the elites.

The social media ecosystem is attention-driven; the platforms themselves make money from advertising and, as a result, want to continue to drive participation. And because the platforms are so crowded, its often the loudest voices that get the most attention, which carries over into our larger political debates.

Distrust and trolling is happening at the highest levels of political debate, and the lowest, said researcher Kate Crawford. The Overton Window has been widened considerably by the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, and not in a good way. We have heard presidential candidates speak of banning Muslims from entering the country, asking foreign powers to hack former White House officials, retweeting neo-Nazis. Trolling is a mainstream form of political discourse.

And as social medias influence has grown, traditional media outlets have seen their influence wane. Heres how Steven Waldman, the founder and CEO of LifePosts, explained it:

It certainly sounds noble to say the internet has democratized public opinion. But its now clear: It has given voice to those who had been voiceless because they were oppressed minorities and to those who were voiceless because they are crackpots. It may not necessarily be bad actors i.e., racists, misogynists, etc. who win the day, but I do fear it will be the more strident.

Some respondents were more optimistic that the levels of online discourse would improve over the next decade. Artificial intelligence and other technological improvements will help improve dialogue, some said.

I expect we will develop more social bots and algorithmic filters that would weed out the some of the trolls and hateful speech, Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, said. I expect we will create bots that would promote beneficial connections and potentially insert context-specific data/facts/stories that would benefit more positive discourse. Of course, any filters and algorithms will create issues around what is being filtered out and what values are embedded in algorithms.

Additionally, as platforms become more influenced by algorithms, respondents expect to see continued fragmentation of the online ecosystem.

There will still be some places where you can find those with whom to argue, but they will be more concentrated into only a few locations than they are now, senior design researcher Lindsay Kenzig said.

Respondents also expressed concern that increased regulation of online spaces could result in surveillance and censorship. They also worried that people would begin to change their positive online behaviors as surveillance increase.

Rebecca MacKinnon, director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America foundation, said shes worried about the state of free speech online:

The demands for governments and companies to censor and monitor internet users are coming from an increasingly diverse set of actors with very legitimate concerns about safety and security, as well as concerns about whether civil discourse is becoming so poisoned as to make rational governance based on actual facts impossible. Im increasingly inclined to think that the solutions, if they ever come about, will be human/social/political/cultural and not technical.

Queensland University of Technology professor Marcus Foth warned that the increased regulation of online speech could result in polarization and filter bubbles:

With less anonymity and less diversity, the two biggest problems of the Web 1.0 era have been solved from a commercial perspective: fewer trolls who can hide behind anonymity. Yet what are we losing in the process? Algorithmic culture creates filter bubbles, which risk an opinion polarization inside echo chambers.

The full report, in which you are certain to find at least one opinion you agree with, s available here.

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People who think about this stuff don't think bad online behavior will get better any time soon - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard