These are strange, unsettling times. And for the past several months, Ive been asking psychologists variations on a basic question: What research can best help us reckon with uncomfortable social and political realities like the rise of Donald Trump, the widening partisan split, the divisiveness that comes with multiculturalism?

More than ever before, people of different ideological backgrounds seem to live in separate universes. One example: In the days after the inauguration, social scientists showed participants photos of Trumps inaugural crowd and Obamas. Those who had voted for Trump were more likely to say Trump had the larger turnout, despite obvious differences in the photos that demonstrated otherwise.

Psychology can help explain these tense times. Old theories, like motivated reasoning, are more clearly true than ever before. And new work has confirmed that humanity still contains its same base instincts of the prehistoric era.

Consider this a primer. Here are seven essential lessons on the hidden forces shaping our views and actions in the Trump era.

If you think I missed something that should be on this list, send me an email: brian@vox.com

One of the key psychological concepts for understanding politics is also one of the oldest.

Its called motivated cognition, or motivated reasoning. And theres no clearer example than in a paper published way back in the 1950s.

The Dartmouth versus Princeton football game of November 1951 was, by all accounts, brutal. One Princeton player broke his nose. One Dartmouth player broke his leg.

Princeton students blamed the Dartmouth team for instigating. The Dartmouth paper accused Princetons. In the contentious debates that ensued about "who started it," psychologists at the two schools united to answer this question: Why did each school have such a different understanding of what happened?

In the weeks after the Princeton-Dartmouth game, the psychologists Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril ran a very simple test. Their findings would become the classic example of a concept called motivated reasoning: Our tendency to come to conclusions were already favored to believe.

When they asked students at each of their universities to watch video highlights from the game, 90 percent of the Princeton students said it was Dartmouth that instigated the rough play. Princeton students were also twice as likely to call penalties on Dartmouth than their own team. The majority of Dartmouth students, on the other hand, said both sides were to blame for the rough play in the game, and called a similar number of penalties for both teams. Hastorf and Cantrils conclusion wasnt that one set of fans was lying. Its that being a fan fundamentally changes the way you perceive the game.

The lesson is simple: People are more likely to arrive at conclusions that they want to arrive at, the psychologist Ziva Kunda wrote in a seminal 1990 paper, making the case that motivated reasoning is real and pervasive.

And theres plenty of proof of it today. When Gallup polled Americans the week before and the week after the presidential election, Democrats and Republicans flipped their perceptions of the economy. But nothing had actually changed about the economy. What changed was which team was winning.

Motivated reasoning plays into why people from poor communities were willing to vote for Trump, a candidate whose party is keen to pare back the social safety net and has a proposed a health care bill that will lead to millions more becoming uninsured.

One crucial thing to know about motivated reasoning is that you often dont realize youre doing it. We automatically have an easier time remembering information that fits our world views. Were simply quicker to recognize information that confirms what we already know, which makes us blind to facts that discount it.

None of this psychology is to suggest that people who engage in motivated reasoning are stupid. No, they are just human. For example, a lot of evangelicals voted for Trump because of the simple fact he was the Republican presidential candidate, despite having reason to dismiss him after the Access Hollywood tape where he bragged about sexual assault leaked. Republican is the political team they play on. And that allowed them to find ways to justify their support.

Motivated reasoning can affect anyone, and liberals do it, too. Some are retweeting rogue federal Twitter accounts that have no verification that theyre indeed written by disgruntled federal staffers. At the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer asked Brooke Binkowski, the head of fact-checking website Snopes.com, if fake news targeted toward liberals is on the rise. Of course yes! she said. (See some examples here.)

Lets remember that.

If a group of people have the same, solid grounding in the same facts about politics, then everyone should come to the same conclusions, right? Wrong.

Study after study has shown that this assumption is not supported by the data, says Dietram Scheufele, who studies science communication at the University of Wisconsin.

In fact, studies show the exact opposite: The more informed people are about politics, the more likely they are to be stubborn about political issues.

This concept is related to motivated reasoning, but its important enough to warrant its own consideration. It shows how motivated reasoning becomes especially stubborn and ugly when it comes to politics.

People are using their reason to be socially competent actors, says Dan Kahan, a psychologist at Yale, and one of the leading experts on this phenomenon. Put another way: We have a lot of pressure to live up to our groups expectations. And the smarter we are, the more we put our brain power to use for that end.

In his studies, Kahan will often give participants different kinds of math problems.

When the problem is about nonpolitical issues like figuring out the whether a drug is effective people tend to use their math skills to solve it. But when theyre evaluating something political lets say, the effectiveness of gun control measures the trend is that the better participants are at math, the more partisan they are in their responses.

Partisans with weak math skills were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology, Ezra Klein explained in a profile of Kahans work. Partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.

And its not just for math problems: Kahan finds that Republicans who have higher levels of science knowledge are more stubborn when it comes to questions on climate change. The pattern is consistent: The more information we have, the more we bend it to serve our political aims. Thats why the current debate over fake news is a bit misguided: Its not the case that if only people had perfectly true information, everyone would suddenly agree.

So think of that when you hear politicians or pundits talk shop: They know a lot about politics, but theyre bending what they know to fall in line with their political goals. And they probably dont realize they are doing this and can feel confident in their partisan conclusions because they feel well informed.

Theres a reason why we engage in motivated reasoning, a reason why facts often dont matter: evolution.

Critical thinking and reasoning skills evolved because they made it easier to cooperate in groups, Elizabeth Kolbert explains in a recent New Yorker piece. Weve since adapted these skills to make breakthroughs in topics like science and math. But when pressed, we default to using our powers of mind to get along with our groups.

Psychologists theorize thats because our partisan identities get mixed up with our personal identities. Which would mean that an attack on our strongly held beliefs is an attack on the self.

The brains primary responsibility is to take care of the body, to protect the body, Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, says. The psychological self is the brains extension of that. When our self feels attacked, our [brain is] going to bring to bear the same defenses that it has for protecting the body.

Its like we have an immune system for uncomfortable thoughts.

Recently, Kaplan has found more evidence that we tend to take political attacks personally. In a study recently published in Scientific Reports, he and collaborators took 40 self-avowed liberals who reported having deep convictions, put them inside in a functional MRI scanner, and started challenging their beliefs. Then they watched which parts of the participants brains lit up.

Their conclusion: When the participants were challenged on strongly held beliefs, there was more activation in the parts of the brain that are thought to correspond with self-identity and negative emotions.

Theres a dynamic playing out in the current health care debate, and in health care debates of ages past. Liberals make their arguments for expanding coverage in terms of equality and fairness (i.e., everyone should have a right to health care), while conservatives make their case grounded in self-determination (i.e., the government shouldnt tell me how to live) and fiscal security (i.e., paying for health care will bankrupt us all).

According to a psychological theory called moral foundations, its no surprise that these arguments fail spectacularly at changing minds.

Moral foundations is the idea that people have stable, gut-level morals that influence their worldview. The liberal moral foundations include equality, fairness, and protection of the vulnerable. Conservative moral foundations favor in-group loyalty, moral purity, and respect for authority.

These moral foundations are believed to be somewhat consistent over our lifetimes, and they may have a biological basis as well. (Theres some fascinating experimental work that shows that conservatives are more excited as measured by perspiration by negative or alarming images.)

Moral foundations explain why messages highlighting equality and fairness resonate with liberals and why more patriotic messages like make America great again get some conservative hearts pumping.

The thing is, we often dont realize that people have moral foundations different than our own.

When we engage in political debates, we all tend to overrate the power of arguments we find personally convincing and wrongly think the other side will be swayed.

On gun control, for instance, liberals are persuaded by stats like, "No other developed country in the world has nearly the same rate of gun violence as does America." And they think other people will find this compelling, too.

Conservatives, meanwhile, often go to this formulation: "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

What both sides fail to understand is that they're arguing a point that their opponents may be inherently deaf to.

In a study, psychologists Robb Willer and Matthew Feinberg had around 200 conservative and liberal study participants write essays to sway political opponents on the acceptance of gay marriage or to make English the official language of the United States.

Almost all the participants made the same mistake.

Only 9 percent of the liberals in the study made arguments that reflected conservative moral principles. Only 8 percent of the conservative made arguments that had a chance of swaying a liberal.

No wonder why its so hard to change another persons mind.

Nour Kteily, a psychologist at Northwestern University, conducts research on one of the darkest, most ancient, and most disturbing mental programs encoded into our minds: dehumanization, the ability to see fellow men and women as less than human.

Psychologists are no strangers to this subject. But the prevailing wisdom has been that most people are not willing to admit to having prejudice against others.

Wrong.

In Kteilys studies, participants typically groups of mostly white Americans are shown this (scientifically inaccurate) image of a human ancestor slowly learning how to stand on two legs and become fully human. And then they are told to rate members of different groups such as Muslims, Americans, and Swedes on how evolved they are on a scale of 0 to 100.

Many people in these studies give members of other groups a perfect score, 100, fully human. But many others give others scores putting them closer to animals.

With the Ascent of Man tool, Kteily and collaborators Emile Bruneau, Adam Waytz, and Sarah Cotterill found that, on average, Americans rate other Americans as being highly evolved, with an average score in the 90s. But disturbingly, many also rated Muslims, Mexican immigrants, and Arabs as less evolved.

We typically see scores that average 75, 76, for Muslims, Kteily says. And about a quarter of study participants will rate Muslims on a score of 60 or below.

People who dehumanize are more likely to blame Muslims as a whole for the actions of a few perpetrators. They are more likely to support policies restricting the immigration of Arabs to the United States. People who dehumanize low-status or marginalized groups also score higher on a measure called social dominance orientation, meaning that they favor inequality among groups in society, with some groups dominating others.

And, in a study, blatant dehumanization of Muslims and Mexican immigrants was strongly correlated with Trump support and the correlation was stronger for Trump than any of the other Republican candidates.

In the lead-up to the 2016 election, fear seemed to be everywhere.

After the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, Donald Trump and conservative allies redoubled their promises to make borders more secure and ban whole religious groups from the country. Trumps rhetoric often underscored an us-versus-them mentality illegal immigrants from Mexico were raping our people; countries like China were destroying us on trade.

A lot of new psychological evidence suggests that stoking peoples racial and demographic fears helped Donald Trump win votes.

Negative, scary information is almost always more sticky and memorable than positive information

One of those studies explored the question of what white people feel when they are reminded that minorities will eventually be the majority. And it found that they begin to feel less warm toward members of other races. A more recent experiment showed that reminding white people of this trend increased support for Trump.

What this doesnt mean is that all white people harbor extreme racial animus. It means fear is an all-too-easy button for politicians to press. We fear unthinkingly. It directs our actions. And it nudges us to believe the person who says he will vanquish our fears.

People who think of themselves as not prejudiced (and liberal) demonstrate these threat effects, says Jennifer Richeson, a leading researcher on racial bias.

Theres also this fact to contend with: Negative, scary information is almost always more sticky and memorable than positive information. Negative events capture attention and information processing more readily, elicit strong emotions more easily, and are more memorable, psychologists Daniel Fessler, Anne Pisor, and Colin Holbrook, wrote in a recent study.

They showed participants 14 plausible but false statements, like Kale contains thallium, a toxic heavy metal, that the plant absorbs from soil. Some of the statements, like the one above, implied a warning (dont eat Kale!), others were positive, like Eating carrots results in significantly improved vision.

Participants often found the threatening statements more credible than the non-threatening one, and this was especially true among more conservative participants (and especially true for social conservatives, as compared to fiscal conservative). This is not because conservatives are more gullible. Its because they tend to be more vigilant.

Savvy politicians understand this, and craft messages that stoke that innate vigilance (whether concern is warranted or not). Its hard to blame people for being afraid of threats. Its just in our nature. But you can blame politicians who prey on it.

Other researchers have arrived at similar findings.

Last year, Willer and Feinberg published a paper that found that racial attitudes predicted support for the conservative Tea Party movement. In one study, they showed participants an artificially darkened portrait of President Barack Obama to maximally remind participants hes African American. White participants shown the darkened photo were more likely to report they supported the Tea Party relative to a control condition, the study reported.

Similarly, they found that reminding study participants about a coming minority-majority America made them more likely to support the Tea Party platform.

In the 1960s, Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura showed how easy it is to teach kids to act violently by showing them an adult acting violently.

In this famous experiment, Bandura showed young children between 3 and 6 years old a video of an adult wailing on an inflatable bobo doll (see in the video below). Other children in the study did not see an adult behaving aggressively to the doll.

And sure enough: The kids who saw the aggressive behavior were more aggressive themselves when playing with the doll later on.

Its a simple experiment with a simple conclusion: As humans, even at an early age we learn whats socially acceptable by watching other people.

Lately, weve been witnessing an unsettling number of brazen hate crimes and vandalism against Muslim and Jewish institutions. Its hard to directly link these crimes to the charged political climate. But like Banduras experiment, theres evidence that social norms against prejudice change when people in power start talking and behaving badly.

Some psychologists think Trumps rhetoric and the rise of the alt-right movement that supported him are similarly encouraging people with prejudicial views to act upon them.

I dont think Trump created new prejudices in people not that quickly and not that broadly what he did do is change peoples perceptions about what is okay and what is not okay, University of Kansas psychologist Chris Crandall says.

Recently Crandall and his student Mark White asked 400 Trump and Clinton supporters to rate how normal it is to disparage members people of various marginalized groups like the obese, Muslims, Mexican immigrants, and the disabled both before the election and in the days after.

Both Clinton and Trump supporters were more likely to report it was acceptable to discriminate against these groups after the election. For Trump to say the disparaging things he said during the campaign, and then be rewarded for them, sent a powerful sign.

It took away the suppression from the very highly prejudiced people, Crandall said. And those are people acting.

These results are preliminary (i.e., not yet published in a journal), but theyre reflective of the established literature: Exposure to misbehavior simply makes it more acceptable.

Heres one example. In 2004, sociologists Thomas Ford and Mark Ferguson found that exposure to a racist or sexist joke increased tolerance of further discrimination in people who held prejudicial views. Hearing the off-color joke, they write, Expands the bounds of appropriate conduct, creating a norm of tolerance of discrimination.

Theres still many more questions psychologists want to answer about this political age. Its not enough to define problems in prejudice and reasoning, psychologists are also seeking to solve them. But many answers are still out of reach.

Psychology has been called the hardest science because the human mind comes with so many messy inconsistencies that even the top researchers can get tangled up in. It can take decades to establish a psychological theory, and in just months, new evidence can tear it down. Despite its flaws, psychology is still the best scientific tool we have to understand how human behavior shapes the world.

There are a lot more concepts in psychology that can help us understand whats going on in the world of politics. Here are a few more worth learning about.

Original post:
7 psychological concepts that explain the Trump era of politics - Vox

Among the dozens of displays, interactive events and panels available to participants of South by Southwest last week, the Aggies stole the show with seven activations highlighting work from across the university.

South by Southwest is a globally recognized festival which draws together interactive, film and music industries, attracting tens of thousands each year. This year Texas A&M took over the Hotel Van Zandt, filling it with displays such as a chemistry road show, a virtual reality display combining art with technology and an Aggies Invent competition.

Amy B. Smith, senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer at Texas A&M, said she felt A&Ms mission at South By Southwest was successful.

A definite yes on building awareness and enhancing reputation by showcasing student and faculty work in a very futuristic manner, Smith said. Time will tell on our third goal: To grow the number of Fortune 500 companies hiring our students. There were many companies present who saw our exhibits and feedback was tremendous.

Marco Palma, associate professor and extension economist with the Human Behavior Laboratory, and Steven Woltering, assistant professor and Director of the Neurobiological Lab for Learning and Development, were two of the members of a four-member group called The human lab: Revealing the emotional brain, which demonstrated how they connect brainwaves and track eye movement and facial expressions to determine a persons choices.

Woltering said each of the members of the panel emphasized the possible application of biometrics in different fields.

My presentation aimed to show how biometrics can revolutionize the field of education in the future, Woltering said. I wanted the audience to know about a new initiative at the College of Education called the Neurobiological lab for Learning and Development (NLD) which aims to bridge recent advances in neurobiology and apply them in an educational context.

Palma said he was excited to see the variety of events A&M at South by Southwest and enjoyed the experience of participating.

It was great to have the opportunity to share our vision for the Human Behavior Laboratory, Palma said. We hope to be able to engage with faculty and students interested in using this technology in their research and outreach efforts.

Smith said she hopes to eventually bring A&M back to South by Southwest.

It makes sense to go back, Smith said. The event is global but based nearby. It is attended by corporations who hire our students, media who can spread the word about what we do, venture capital investors and government agencies who provide grants.

Smith said A&Ms participation in South by Southwest is part of a bigger picture.

This is about telling the story of the amazing things that Texas A&M students and faculty do, Smith said. SXSW participation was just a small step. There is more to come born in the minds of scholars who may be reading this now and who will be featured next year.

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A&M brings chemistry road show, virtual reality to SXSW - Texas A&M The Battalion

March 20, 2017

Despite weighing only 3 pounds, the human brain contains more than 100 billion nerve cells and is the most complex gadget in nature.

Your brain reminds you where you live, helps you taste and hear, and keeps your heart beating. But do you know the best way to take care of your brain? If youre looking for the answer, you might want to visit the Millcreek Mall on Saturday, March 25.

The Edinboro University Psychology Club and the Psychology Department will hostBrain Awareness Day from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. in the Widget Kidz Zone. Field experts and university students will be on hand to answer this question and more.

Many people come to the mall specifically to do our activities, but a very large number of attendees are people of all ages who happened to be shopping and stop by our event, said Dr. Peter McLaughlin, Edinboro University psychology professor and organizer of the event. Kids learn about their senses through illusions and try different activities that demonstrate how their brains work.

Children from the elementary level through high school can participate in the free events, which feature games, activities and yes candy, while learning about how the brain works. As part of the fun, children will join a dozen EU psychology majors to make candy neurons while discovering different parts of the brain cell. By solving a maze in a mirror, children can also test their motor memory skills. Brainy the Robot, the official mascot, will be interacting with students to associate brain activity with behavior.

This year, we're excited to have added equipment that can show people the electrical potential in their own brains and muscles, McLaughlin said.

Middle school and high school-age students will challenge their own brains through a series of optical and auditory illusions. Children and adults will also receive goodie bags filled with information about mental and brain health and how to stay sharp as you get older.

The goal of Brain Awareness Day is to increase understanding of the brain with relation to behavior, inspire careers in neuroscience, improve awareness of mental health issues and promote healthy lifestyles.

McLaughlin said the event also provides service learning for Edinboro students studying to become psychologists.

It's a big task, but Edinboro students are always up to it, said McLaughlin, who is a member of the Society for Neuroscience and a past Edinboro University Scholar of the Year. Not only do they jump at the chance to interact with the public especially children but there's no better-trained group. EU has given them the understanding of how the brain relates to human behavior, and they have been trained in the research methods we use to learn these things.

Founded in 2009, Brain Awareness Day at the Millcreek Mall attracts nearly 300 visitors each year, McLaughlin said. This is a crucial step in bringing awareness of brain science to the public.

The brain is unique, he said. It truly is who we are, and its so important to keep it healthy. Its also crucial for the public to be aware of how brain research improves lives.

The worldwide Brain Awareness Week connects scientists and educators with families, schools and communities. This years campaign was March 13-19. With participating Edinboro students on Spring Break during that week, their Brain Awareness Day event was switched to March 25.

The Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives launched the global program to raise awareness of the benefits of brain research. The week of activities and presentations is co-sponsored by the Society for Neuroscience.

For more information about Brain Awareness Day activities at the Millcreek Mall, contact McLaughlin at (814) 732-1787 or visit the Brain Awareness Day at the Millcreek Mall Facebook page.

Brain Awareness Day is part of the Edinboro University 2017 Academic Festival. For a complete schedule, visit http://www.edinboro.edu/academicfestival.

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EU Psychology Department invites children, adults to explore the brain - Edinboro University

This is a 360 video experience. Use your mouse or the arrow keys on your keyboard to see the entire 360 view.

Take a 360-degree video tour inside the former Iowa State Penitentiary at Ft. Madison with Ret. Lieutenant Judy Milks. Brian Powers/The Register

Judy Milks worked as a lieutenant at the now closed Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison for 16 years. She was the prison's first female lieutenant. Here she poses for a photo in the prison's gym.(Photo: Brian Powers/The Register)Buy Photo

FORT MADISON, Ia. Leonard Harveyspent a lot of time in the dark, narrow crevice behind inmate cells. It was a favorite tactic of unruly inmates to plug a toilet and flood their cell. Harvey, plant operations manager at the Iowa State Penitentiary,navigatedthe walkway behind the cell to get at the plug. When aninmate heard the pipe uncapped, he flushed and sent fluidsflying, usually on a new hire who didn't know better.

This was worse than getting spit at, another inmate favorite.

Lacking freedom, they used body fluids as weapons.

The stories of darkness and mystery are rich at the oldprison, its first stones laid before Iowa was a state. At lastit sits entirely empty, themedical wing closed a couple weeks ago, leaving it a relic of human behavior and structures to correct it. And now a group is trying to save it.

Only wind whips through the prison yard where the most violent of criminals at the maximum-security fort once did sit-ups inside chain-link exercise cages. Stone walls surround the vast emptiness, razor wire shining in the sun, and corner battlement towers are vacant of trained weapons specialists who for 178 years watched inmates below.

Here, near the banks of the Mississippi River in Fort Madison, a historical group of structures begins its deterioration while the state pays $1,000 a day to keep the utilities running and its grounds secure.

Some inmates housed in the new prison for men that opened in 2015 would love to see the old hellhole crumble down, said Judy Milks, a retired prison lieutenant who was part of a group to take us inside the walls last week.

She does not.There is too much history here in the structures, some dating to 1839 andon the National Register of Historic Places, too many stories of inmates and guards who lived, worked and died in what was the nation's oldest continuously operating prison.

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Milks is part of the nonprofit Historic Iowa State Penitentiary, a group that is trying to save the prison and potentially create a museum andtourist attraction as they have in prisons in other states.

Somebody needs to come along with some money to do it. So far that isnt happening.

As we venture into the nooks and crannies of a place that might give some people the willies, its as if the last renters had just upped and moved out, leaving toilet paper rolls on metal bunks and scrawled messages on cell walls.

This was their whole world, Milks said. They never got outside these walls, unless they went to Iowa City for medical care.

The new place has no stories, added Patti Wachtendorf, who started work here in her 20s and was named the penitentiarys first female warden in 2017.

This old place has stories, she said. I can almost hear them walking around, all the noises.

Words scribed into a cell wall at the closed Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison.(Photo: Brian Powers/The Register)

The first exterior limestonewall of ancient cell block17 has grown light with age. Back in 1839, prisoners helped construct it, and guards dug holes in the ground for them to sleep at night, said Jean Peiton, a volunteer with the nonprofit, whose mission is to save the prison for education, economic and historical purposes.

At the time, new incarceration methods were spreading nationwide, called the Auburn system. Instead of prisoners being held in large rooms before paying a fine or facing flogging or execution, the system was designed to reform prisoners with strict habits, silence and discipline while separating them into private cells at night.

A four-tiered block of cells center the stone walls, flanked by a cement walkway called a range, which correctional officers patrolled, often ducking thrown objects and insults. Most cells are roughly six feet wide, twice as long, and contain a solid metal bed frame attached to the floor and walls, a sink, toilet and two metal plates attached to the wall that act as a desk and chair.

On the toptier, another cell became famous among guards. A prisoner had painted a large frog around a sink inits open mouth. New guards were often told to find the frog to really know the prison.

New officers were often told they have to find the lizard and the frog at te closed Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison on Wednesday, March 8, 2017, in Fort Madison. The lizard was built into an exterior wall in one of the original buildings and the frog was painted by an inmate in their cell.(Photo: Brian Powers/The Register)

Behind the block of cells is a metal utility walkway where Harvey did his plumbing. Wachtendorf said correctional officers used to quietly stand back there and listen to inmates talk. You can learn a lot, she said.

To the east of the oldest structureare cell blocks 18, 19 and 20, built in the Romanesque Revival style from 1913 to 1942, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Historically significant structures that are owned by the state must be maintained, per Iowa Code. Tearing them down may be difficult.

The nonprofits first step in its preservation is an environmental assessment that costs from $120,000 to $180,000 before deciding what buildings could be used for ahistorical attraction, education and even small business opportunities.

The group has asked the state to fund it. With budget shortfalls at the state and the Iowa Department of Corrections, Wachtendorf said the money just isnt there.

But we need to preserve this history, she said.

Entering cell block 19, Milks had visions of her past work life here.

One of the old cell blocks at the closed Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison.(Photo: Brian Powers/The Register)

It was bedlam, she said. I liked the excitement.

They called them cons for a reason. I was 50 when I started; Im 70 now. They thought they could get something over on me. Being around a while, they couldnt. Its the only way you got respect around here.

She had to quit looking up their crimes.

Baby rapers, mom killers. I had one inmate who took his mother out to eat and then killedher, she said. He loved to talk about it.

The stories behind the historical walls tell not only of correctional methods but those of men and their crimes, the group said. The old timers who lived half a century here and died. The communities that formed within the walls. The practice of religion and the moments of human decency that accompanied the deviant behavior.

Thats why Mark Fullenkamp is involved. The web director at the University of Iowa grew up in Fort Madison. His mom worked at the prison and ordered the last hanging rope in 1963. When he knew it would soon close, he toured the facility and found old wooden boxes filled with glass-plate negatives of prison mugshots dating back 150 years. He has tirelessly embarked on a preservation of those mug shots ever since, as well as compiling written and oral histories of the inmates.

Photo negatives create snapshot of prison's past

The reverse of the decades-old negative at right produced the image above of an Iowa inmate. Mark Fullenkamp has inverted and digitized more than 11,200 glass-plate negatives.(Photo: Special to the Register/Mark Fullenkamp)

The group has studied preservation efforts at penitentiaries in Pennsylvania, Missouri and Ohio. The old Mansfield, Ohio, prison has been a popular attraction because of the movie The Shawshank Redemption. Others, such as the prison in Jefferson City, Mo., have used ghost tours to help make money to maintain it.

The ghost hunters are all after them, Fullenkamp said. They show up at meetings with T-shirts from paranormal groups.

None in the group want to go down that road.

You have a lot of families of people who lived here or who were victims of the people who lived here, so we need to do it respectfully, Wachtendorf said. People died here. People lived here. This isnt a joke.

As we exit the cell block, toilet paper balls are still stuck 10 feet high on the walls across from the cells. Prisoners had wet them or peed on them to toss on the walls, a sort of mummified parting message to the old place.

The exercise cages at the closed Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison.(Photo: Brian Powers/The Register)

Into the next cell block, 20, we stand inside a tight cell. Even without the front barsclosed, the walls close in quickly.

On one wall, an inmate had painted the Hawkeyes logo of the University of Iowa. This is where Milks stands to tell her stories.

She had to call for forced cell extractions byofficers with shields and stab-proof gear. She had to take down a man who had hanged himself.

The inmates took to calling her Eva Gabor when I was 50 pounds lighter and 20 years younger, she said. She got sick of it because every time she came on the range, they all started whistling the theme from Green Acres, an old TV show Gabor starred in. One day, she demanded they call her Phyllis Diller, a comic and actor popular in the 1960s that only the old lifers knew. Somehow it stuck.

She could get along with them with BS and not taking crap. One day when an inmate in a top tier began yelling brutal sexual insults at her, she walked to the middle of the range in full view of the cells, spread her arms wide and leaned back to yell with a wicked smile: Now this is prison!

They all laughed, even the guy yelling the insults, she said.

God I love this place. Isnt it awful?

In the theater, Fullenkamp said he recently found a receipt for what he considers the last movie shown there, Death Games, about an inmate using martial arts to clean up a corrupt prison. More importantly, the Art Deco seatsand historical nature of the 1930s-era U-shaped structure that also housed the chow hall are in peril.

The theater sits silent in an 1930s-era building that was damaged in a 2015 storm.(Photo: Special to The Register)

Its deteriorating with a roof problemand window damage from a 2015 storm.

The group Preservation Iowa has the penitentiary on its 2017 list of most endangered properties.

The city doesnt want it, the state doesnt want it, but people in these rust belt towns need something, Fullenkamp saidof one of Iowas most economically struggling counties (Lee). I think we are opening minds. At first, people said you cant do anything with that place. Then you see them thinking about it.

Go into a bar around here at 1 a.m., added Harvey, you hear all kinds of ideas.

Historical photographs tell many stories. Fullenkamp has ideas of projecting inmates historical photographs on cell walls with an audio oral history for tour groups. There are stories of the 1981 riot, when inmates took over the prison, orthe 2005 escape, when two inmates fashioned a makeshift rope out of upholstery fabric and used to it climb over razor wire and leap from the stone walls, only to be captured later in nearby states.

There are the hanging gallows, right on the southeast corner of the prison walls, where Fullenkamp saw the photo of ahangmans lowered head as he preparedan execution.

A crowd gathers at the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison before the Nov. 24, 1922, hanging of Orrie Cross, who had slain Des Moines grocer George Fosdick.(Photo: Register file photo)

We stand there quietly looking at the cornerwhere people far and wide came, even onriver boats,to watch men hang.

Its the unknown, Peiton said of the appeal inside these walls. Wondering how one survives in little cages. The vast aura of despair and occasional enlightenment of the men who lived here.

A section of the now closed Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison that was once used for hangings .(Photo: Brian Powers/The Register)

The ring of an old sweat lodge that native Americans used outside the chapel attests to past hopes. Those inmates, said the prison officials and preservationist on the tour, were not always the monsters portrayed in film. They could be normal, absentdrugs or alcohol, or with medication for a mental illness.

I stood there talking to these guys like Im talking to you,Harvey said. Its not like on TV, all those popular prison shows now. But I have to admit, I go home and watch them, and Im in here living it every day. Doesnt make sense.

Many of the old inmates who fiercely protected their routines, playing dominoes on the tables aside the gymnasium floor, have passed on. The young guys who played basketball have staked out their territories in the new prison.

All thats left here is a lot of emptiness, not a sound for the first time in 178 years.

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Go inside an abandoned Iowa prison full of beauty, sadness - DesMoinesRegister.com

Weve become a culture that prides itself on excessive behavior. We boast of being totally OCD about how we arrange our desks, we humblebrag that we check our social media feeds addictively. And in a world of such overload, its hard to tell what truly constitutes overdoing it. Science writer Sharon Begley is here to help. In her new book Cant. Just. Stop: An Investigation of Compulsions, she examines the compulsive mind and she separates disorders from impulses, anxieties from addictions. Its a fascinating history and exploration of a particular bent in the human psyche, and how it can manifest in everything from video-game playing to hoarding. Salon spoke recently to Begley about how technology plays with our brains, and the upsides of anxiety.

This is not just a book about a single kind of mental disorder. Tell us what the impetus for exploring compulsion was.

I looked around at my friends, my colleagues and the world in general and was seeing that a lot of us are engaged in one or another compulsive behavior. Im not surprised, given the industry where I work. A lot of us deal with compulsions. None of us can go anywhere without our phones any more. It wasnt just the ubiquity of that behavior but it was a suspicion about what underlies it that we dont love it. Its not that its making us joyful and satisfied or excited or it instillspositive emotions. But it all has to do with avoiding the negative function.

When youre a reporter and you cant go to the bathroom without your phone, its not because you love your phone. Its because youre terrified that youre going to miss something. That little germ of an insight made me look at other compulsions. It turns out that so many of them indeed are also driven not by, Well, I love this. This is really making me feel good, but by Oh my God, if I dont do this, Im going to feel totally horrible.

It was really interesting for me when I began to understand OCD as an anxiety disorder.

When I started this, I was on the fence about including an OCD chapter partly because I thought that it might be more insightful to look at the compulsions that are not recognized as mental disorders. Of course, so much has been written about OCD. But then as I got into the research, it was clear that OCD provided many insights psychologists and psychiatrists have, and that could be the jumping-off point for a lot of discussion about other stuff. Im glad I included it, but I still think that it should not overshadow everything else just because itsthe one compulsion that I think most people are familiar with.

You also demonstratetwo of the points that are really crucial to your book and make it really special. One is establishing the distinction in our very often fluid conversation between compulsion and addiction: what those both are and how those things really boil down. And you really do keep coming back again and again and again to the fact that with compulsive behaviors, people dont do them because they make them feel good; they do them because its about responding to fear and anxiety. I use the same analogy when I talk about medication, and people who take antidepressants. Theyre not taking them because it makes them feel great. Theyre taking them because it makes them feel not as bad.

Yeah. Theyre just getting you up to the baseline of zero. Getting into positive territory is a wish that we all look for but its just really, really tough. So many of us are just settling for, just please get me out of negative territory.

The other point that you make throughout the book is that concept you hear people say: Were all a little mentally ill. We all have a little bit of mental illness. You talk about the fact that compulsion and compulsive behaviors are very prevalent but you flip it. That doesnt mean that were all mentally ill because it doesnt mean that all compulsive behavior is mentally-ill behavior.

Exactly. I think that was a consequence of covering psychology and psychiatry for a few years and just listening to the conversation and the debate. So many of the things that psychiatrists are really, really quick to try to find the diagnosis on are just, I think, somewhere along the spectrum of human behavior and human quirks and not necessarily mental disorders.

As you point out in the book, there is an ancestral and genetic reason for us to have anxieties and for us to have fears. There is an argument to be made that those are the kinds of genes that get successfully passed down because people who have that enhanced ability to sense danger or to be aware of danger are more likely to survive.

Absolutely. Those who didnt get an adrenaline rush and a sense of fear and anxiety when they heard twigs cracking did not survive to be our ancestors. Theres absolutely an evolutionary case for why anxiety is adaptive.

I think one reason why were seeing so much compulsive behavior now is emblematic of this age. Of course, I wrote thisbook before Jan. 20, beforeNov. 8. When you are living in the time that we are, it really makes sense that people go to any kind of behavior or way of thinking that can drain away just enough of that anxiety so that they can operate.

Its hard to not feel anxiety. Its hard to manage our own level of participation in it. How do we have any measure of control? Sometimes the only measure of control one has is to compulsively keep refreshing the New York Times page.

Talking about this now, many things in the book were not in my original plan but in retrospect Im glad theyre there. There are some benefits to anxiety that are helpful to the individual and the world. We do what we can. Theres only one Steve Bannon or Paul Ryan, and those of us who are mostly on the sidelines are motivated by anxiety to go out and do something. Lets be appreciative of what anxiety can push us to do.

Youre bringing up the point of anxiety as an agent for good and compulsiveness as an agent for good as well. Certainly it bears mentioning that these impulses can be part of a brain that is reaching to make things good.

For many of us, even in these milder forms, its a reaction and its a way of trying to make order and sense of things and trying to make them good and just also trying to alleviate anxiety.

Because this is such a fluid and plastic concept, how does one really know when something is a disorder and when its just your basic, run of the mill, modern life compulsive behavior?

One of the many difficulties that psychiatry has is that it has no blood test. At the end of the day, theres a huge amount of subjectivity involved. However, the basic answer is, in order for something to be a mental disorder, it has to cause either distress or impairment. It has to impair your ability to function in the world, which means relationships, school, job, wherever you are in your mind. It has to cause distress, which again is a subjective thing. So if instead the behavior is helping you and not causing distress or impairment, then youd really better think twice before labeling it a mental disorder. In the case of OCD, it tends to be impairing if you have to keep running back to your house to see if you locked the front door or go to the restroom 50times a day to wash your hands. I would say psychiatry has a way to go before it can figure out how to make accurate, objective diagnoses.

We seem to have not just with anxiety disorders, because we certainly seem to do it with addictions a kind of Aw, isnt that cute? attitude around certain mental disorders. What do you think about this primal attraction or inability to see the line between normal or interesting eccentric and, Oh, this is actually disordered behavior?

Ive observed the same thing, like that show Monk. That was portrayed exactly as you said: romanticized with a little bit play for humor. But the message was, this is cute and eccentric and it makes him more interesting. Of course, the way hoarders are depicted on some of the cable shows, thats less sympathetic in its portrayal, but theresjust an inability to perceive that so much is really, really about suffering or struggling. I dont know why we tend to romanticize some of these things, because the the flip side, of course, is the stigma of mental illness. Could it be that we dont want to recognize when people are suffering because then that might make us think that especially if its someone were close to then I have an obligation to try to help? Its just easier to say, Oh, charming, cute, interesting, whatever. Honestly, its a puzzle.There is nothing fun or charming or cute about it. For people who are really suffering, they are suffering.

Why do you think it feels like we are a more compulsive culture than ever before?

One of the reasons, I think, is technology. Because the digital stuff that we now have is set up, especially in terms of its reward structure, to tap into the part of our brain that cant resist acting compulsively. But just because you have a compulsive behavior doesnt mean that your brain is broken. Instead, if its social media or tweeting or email or checking, texting and all the other things, its because these things have a structure that exploits the way our brains work.

The important phrase that really struck me is the concept of intermittent reward, and how seductive that is.

Also, just so many of us cannot stand to be alone with our own thoughts that we have that crutch so that we dont have to think. A reporter interviewed me last week asking something about why people, when theyre out on social occasions dinner parties, dinner with friends, bar, or whatever have their faces always attached to their screen. That is a lot easier to do and that drives away anxiety from what would otherwise be an anxiety-provoking social situation.The reason I think so many of us are acting compulsively is the technology. It just exploits something that we all have within us.

Read more from the original source:
Author Sharon Begley on why we Can't. Just. Stop. being compulsive - Salon

Hello. My name is Bandit. As you can see, Im a robot.

When we picture robots providing care, we tend to assume it must be physical care. Human illness, however, is hardly constrained to the body. Thus computer scientist Maja Matari is developing socially assistive robots that focus on the psychological.

Bandit, a computerized rolling torso with a gingerbread man-like face, can help with physical therapy by demonstrating the correct movements and performing them right alongside the patient. But it also goes into the realm of emotional support, creativity, and companionship.

Hey, lets do something a little more fun, Bandit tells the man its working with at Mataris University of Southern California laboratory. Lets play the imitation game. Move your arms. Show me what do to.

The man begins to lead, stretching his arms. And Bandit mirrors him.

Im having fun, Bandit says in a cheery voice. I can play this game all day long.

For people with debilitating conditions physical trauma to Alzheimers to autism Matari says that socially responsive robots are uniquely positioned to supplement human caregiving. Their automated nature lends itself to encouraging necessary, repetitive tasks. Coupled with their physical presence, they could prove a vital resource in helping patients manage or recover from their respective conditions. A paper describing her recent research was published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

Perhaps one day a robot like me may help you or someone you know, Bandit says.

Fifteen years ago, Matari created the field of socially assistive robotics (SAR). Its goal is to design robots that are intuitive, supportive, and ultimately able to help people without doing physical work.

So what can [assistive robots] do? Matari tells Inverse. All kinds of other things. Increasing situational awareness, reminding people of things getting them to do repetitive daily tasks that will help them get better and stay better. You dont see that being addressed even though its very badly needed.

We know that screen-based contact can be effective, but not as effective as actual physical presence. Our brains more engage better when we interact with the real thing, and the real thing doesnt have to be a person. It can be an animal; it can be a robot.

SAR is distinct from simple social robotics in that it aims to influence behavior. Its the difference between something that reminds a patient to exercise or take a pill or attend therapy and something that persuades them to do those things when they dont want to.

People say, Oh, why dont you use an app for that? Matari says. Because there are literally a gazillion and almost none are effective. Our brains are wired to interact with other physical creatures. And then once youve got this robot it what does it look like? And how does it behave? That all creates expectations on the part of the user.

People dont feel as embarrassed in front of machines as they do with human caretakers, or as guilty about asking for help. Were better able to process assistive robots for what they are when they look more classically robotic. If a robot looks too realistic too human users tend to perceive it as being smart.

To make patients comfortable, its imperative that the robots pick up on social cues, reading tone and body language and reacting neither too quickly nor too slowly. This is an ongoing challenge in the field, which is why Matari wants future SAR developers to collaborate with experts in social and psychological sciences, as well as with ones for conditions like autism.

All robots are on the autism spectrum, Matari says. They have no idea how to react to social cues appropriately.

Of course, for a child with autism, that may be an asset. Matari, who has worked with many different patient populations over the last 15 years, says that beyond what individual specifications people may need to accommodate their respective disabilities, the common thread is always the humanity the universal desire for dignity, positive feedback, and measurable progress that transcends age or gender or disease.

Matari predicts that the adoption of socially assistive robots will vary by specialty. Companies looking to introduce them to hospital settings will evolve them at a different pace than those suited for special-needs classrooms or Alzheimers homes. She figures the home market will be the most consumer-driven, and so the most profitable, which means that use might take off faster there, even though its arguably the most difficult to do well.

In the meantime, Matari says people who view her work as part of a robots-replacing-people narrative are missing the nuances of these situations. Socially assistive robots can supplement caregivers who are overtaxed, and they can provide a structure and reliability that humans cannot. But there are some things theyll never do.

It doesnt mean were ever looking at replacing human care with machines, she says. Theyre never going to be like people and that should never be the goal.

Photos via USC News Communications

Kastalia grew up in Littleton, Colorado, and has a journalism degree from the University of Southern California. She spent the past year and a half backpacking around the world and recently moved to New York. Her RTs = unwavering personal convictions.

Original post:
Futuristic Robot Helpers Can Influence Human Behavior - Inverse

As part of Infosecuritys Life of... series, this webinar will look at the role of consultants who specialise in social engineering and human behaviour as it relates to cybersecurity. The social engineer is often a highly-skilled, highly-motivated adversary. As people and their working environment become more connected, hacking the human rather than the network is often the most effective route for an adversary. As any information security professional knows, the human is the weakest link in any defense strategy and consequently it is essential to understand how social engineers manipulate individuals and exploit security weaknesses.

Cybersecurity behavior experts are able to analyze and detect human behaviors and advise organizations and individuals how not to get stung by the social engineers. In this roundtable webinar, we will bring together some leading experts to discuss this topic and talk about what its like to be a cybersecurity behaviour expert or social engineering consultant.

This session will include:

See the article here:
Life of: A Cybersecurity Behavior Expert - Infosecurity Magazine - Infosecurity Magazine

March 17th, 2017 by James Ayre

Humans may have played a very active role in the desertification of the Sahara, according to new research from Dr David Wright of Seoul National University.

The new findings directly contradict the earlier supposition that the rapid shift from a heavily greened landscape to the modern Sahara desert, over just a few thousand years time, was driven entirely by natural processes. (Obviously, if one considers human behavior to be natural, than there is no real distinction, but that doesnt change the fact that people may have played a major role in the desertification of the region.)

In East Asia there are long established theories of how Neolithic populations changed the landscape so profoundly that monsoons stopped penetrating so far inland, commented Wright. Wright then went on to note that evidence of human-driven climatic and ecological change has been documented in Europe, North America, and New Zealand as well, and that similar scenarios could well have occurred in the Sahara.

Nick Fraser, Journal Development Manager, Frontiers in Earth Sciences, provides more: To test his hypothesis, Wright reviewed archaeological evidence documenting the first appearances of pastoralism across the Saharan region, and compared this with records showing the spread of scrub vegetation, an indicator of an ecological shift towards desert-like conditions. The findings confirmed his thoughts; beginning approximately 8,000 years ago in the regions surrounding the Nile River, pastoral communities began to appear and spread westward, in each case at the same time as an increase in scrub vegetation.

Growing agricultural addiction had a severe effect on the regions ecology. As more vegetation was removed by the introduction of livestock, it increased the albedo (the amount of sunlight that reflects off the earths surface) of the land, which in turn influenced atmospheric conditions sufficiently to reduce monsoon rainfall. The weakening monsoons caused further desertification and vegetation loss, promoting a feedback loop which eventually spread over the entirety of the modern Sahara.

If true, that would make for simply yet another version of the age-old human story of unintended consequences. In other words, its yet another show of the fact that humans arent nearly as clever as most of uslike to thinkwe are.

To reiterate that last point, historical study clearly shows that soil erosion and desertification played a significant role in the collapse of many earlier civilizations. And since were talking about North Africa here it should be remembered that after the Roman Republic had more or less depleted the soils of Southern Europe (and entered into the civil war period that led to the birth of the Roman Empire), it colonized the region which still possessed good soil fertility at the time at the expense of the mostly Phoenician locals. (The Afri were one of the Phoenician groups living there at the time, and served as the basis of the name Africa.)

For many of the years that followed, this colonization of North Africa functioned as the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. The current state of North Africas depleted soils is partly the result of the mass-scale agriculture of the time, and partly the result of the overgrazing and abandonment of the aqueducts that followed Islamic conquest. (There was also a brief period when the Germanic Vandals had control of some parts of the region, before the Arabs then pushed them out.)

Commenting on what comes next, Wright stated: There were lakes everywhere in the Sahara at this time, and they will have the records of the changing vegetation. We need to drill down into these former lake beds to get the vegetation records, look at the archaeology, and see what people were doing there. It is very difficult to model the effect of vegetation on climate systems. It is our job as archaeologists and ecologists to go out and get the data, to help to make more sophisticated models.

Overall, Wrights work makes for an interesting interpretation of the available data. Personally, I wouldnt be surprised at all if humans were the primary driver of desertification in the region aided by the climatic turbulence of the times. Theres probably a parallel to be drawn there with modern times

The new findings are detailed in a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science.

Image bySidy Niang(some rights reserved)

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Tags: desertification, North Africa, overgrazing, Sahara Desert

James Ayre 's background is predominantly in geopolitics and history, but he has an obsessive interest in pretty much everything. After an early life spent in the Imperial Free City of Dortmund, James followed the river Ruhr to Cofbuokheim, where he attended the University of Astnide. And where he also briefly considered entering the coal mining business. He currently writes for a living, on a broad variety of subjects, ranging from science, to politics, to military history, to renewable energy. You can follow his work on Google+.

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Humans May Have Played Very Active Role In Desertification Of The Sahara, Research Finds - CleanTechnica

Cyber Defense

As the Pentagons Joint Regional Security Stacks moves forward with efforts to reduce the server footprint, integrate regional data networks and facilitate improved interoperability between previously stove-piped data systems, IT developers see cybersecurity efforts moving quickly toward increased artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

I think within the next 18-months, AI will become a key factor in helping human analysts make decisions about what to do, former DOD Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen said.

As technology and advanced algorithms progress, new autonomous programs able to perform a wider range of functions by themselves are expected to assist human programmers and security experts defending DOD networks from intrusions and malicious actors.

Given the volume and where I see the threat moving, it will be impossible for humans by themselves to keep pace, Halvorsen added.

Much of the conceptual development surrounding this AI phenomenon hinges upon the recognition that computers are often faster and more efficient at performing various procedural functions; at the same time, many experts maintain that human cognition is important when it comes to solving problems or responding to fast-changing, dynamic situations.

However, in some cases, industry is already integrating automated computer programs designed to be deceptive giving potential intruders the impression that what they are probing is human activity.

For example, executives from the cybersecurity firm Galois are working on a more sophisticated version of a honey pot tactic, which seeks to create an attractive location for attackers, only to glean information about them.

Honey pots are an early version ofcyberdeception. We are expanding on that concept and broadening it greatly, said Adam Wick, research head at Galois.

A key element of these techniques uses computer automation to replicate human behavior to confuse a malicious actor, hoping to monitor or gather information from traffic going across a network.

Its goal is to generate traffic that misleads the attacker, so that the attacker cannot figure out what is real and what is not real, he added.

The method generates very human looking web sessions, Wick explained. An element of this strategy is to generate automated or fake traffic to mask web searches and servers so that attackers do not know what is real.

Fake computers look astonishingly real, he said. We have not to date been successful in always keeping people off of our computers. How can we make the attackers job harder once they get to the site, so they are not able to distinguish useful data from junk.

Using watermarks to identify cyber behavior of malicious actors is another aspect of this more offensive strategy to identify and thwart intruders.

We cant predict every attack. Are we ever going to get where everything is completely invulnerable? No, but with AI, we can change the configuration of a network faster than humans can, Halvorsen added.

The concept behind the AI approach is to isolate a problem, reroute around it, and then destroy the malware.

About the Author

Kris Osborn is editor-in-chief of Defense Systems. He can be reached at kosborn@1105media.com.

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Pentagon sees more AI involvement in cybersecurity - Defense Systems

The worst cliche in pop culture is the suggestion that platonic friendship is just true love waiting to happen. I don't say worst only because it's lazy, which it is, but because it's a dangerous, false and cruel idea for entertainment to promote.

Chuck Klosterman, in his 2003 book "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs," described this as the "When Harry Met Sally" problem, referring to the romantic comedy that "made it realistic to suspect your best friend may be your soul mate, and it made wanting such a scenario comfortably conventional."

Plenty of movies and shows before and since have validated the notion that a friend you happen to develop romantic feelings for is just a future lover who doesn't realize it yet. Almost every long-running television series featuring an opposite-sex friendship has at some point fallen back on the "let's hook them up" storyline. It makes sense you can't fill 11 seasons of "Friends" or "Cheers" without eventually pairing off some of the leads.

"Buffy the Vampire Slayer," the best and most important show ever created seriously, fight me on this had a clever way of handling the inevitable sexual tension between its lead female and male characters: it abstained.

Fans of the show last week celebrated the 20th anniversary of its premiere on the WB network. Plenty has been written in the media about this milestone, and there is a lot to say about the Joss Whedon series' formal inventiveness, its fierce feminist message, its powerful LGBT advocacy, its subversion of narrative tropes and its role in normalizing geek culture.

But what I remember most from the shows seven-year run is a warning about mixing friendship and more-than-friendship. In the finale of the first season, Xander (Nicholas Brendon) finally musters the courage to confess to his best friend Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) that he loves her. He delivers a well-rehearsed speech asking her to a school dance, but she says no.

Buffy, taken aback by the unexpected advance, feels terrible about rejecting her friend. Xander, his pride wounded by the rebuke, says something mean and stomps off, leaving her hurt and confused even though she didnt do anything. Later in the episode, Xander recognizes that his friendship with Buffy, and all the demon-fighting they do together, is more important than his precious feelings and saves her from death at the hands of a vampire master, as one does.

Its a delicate handling of something almost everyone encounters, some of us more than others. An even better episode in the second season found Xander empowered by a misfired love spell that made him the object of lust for every girl in school, including his onetime friend-crush, Buffy, where he learns that getting what you think you want might actually be a nightmare.

The show should be mandatory viewing for every high-school student. If Id seen and internalized it when it originally aired, instead of when I fell into a Netflix rabbit hole at about age 30, I might have avoided years of dumb behavior.

For the longest time, I was one of those dudes who would always fail romantically, blame everyone but himself, then use the failure as an excuse to become embittered instead of addressing an underlying terror of intimacy. I was a Xander, which is to say, a jerk.

A Xander will complain about the friend zone as if its some dark corner of the Buffyverse to which all nice guys are banished. He'll will read an embarrassing number of books by self-described pick-up artists (any number above zero is embarrassing) not to learn about human behavior but to gain tools of revenge. He'll act like a victim even though hes the one ruining relationships.

Age cured this self-affliction, but not soon enough. There arent many things from my teens and 20s I want to do over, but I would go to the Hellmouth and back for a few more youthful years uncursed by Xanderness.

Troy Reimink is a writer and musician who lives in west Michigan.

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Troy Reimink: 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' helped me become less of a jerk - Traverse City Record Eagle