Empathy and The Mind of EzraLEvant

 

 

 

Here’s a bigger disgrace: using the strong emotions evoked by Remembrance Day to drum up resentment against immigrants and religious minorities for completely imaginary disloyalty. Which is what Levant does.

 

There's an assumption here on Keenan's part that there's a compartmentalization between whatever Ezra Levant's personal views are and the frame he chose to present with his Remembrance Day Rant.  In other words, in the perspective Keenan presents, Levant and co. intentionally hit the racist button because 1) they think that's what they're audience wants or 2) to generate controversy and get Levant some broader attention, which given his viewership numbers he kinda needs.

 

Given the brand hits, staff hours lost to damage control and probably billable consulting hours by high-priced lawyers, I would question the cost/benefit analysis of a cynical play like this, but there's no evidence to conclude the Sun News team do or don't do this kind of prefrontal analysis.

 

What we do know, however, is that people make choices, including the choice not to think through consequences.  The impetus for these choices has to come from somewhere.

 

So if we want to understand the root cause of these Levant rants, we have to dig a little deeper. 

 

Levant regularly and vindictively targets people not like him - "lefties," Sinti-Roma, Muslims.  These are people he apparently sees as a threat to Canada, rather than reflective of Canada's diversity. 

 

He does not vindictively target people he perceives as like him - they're the true patriots. 

 

How he rationalizes this to himself is his business, but looking at his actual though process is revealing.

 

Here's the quote that got Levant started:

 

"Please note that meaningful alternate activities should be provided at the schools for those families who do not wish their children to participate in any Remembrance Day ceremonies.”

 

I read this, I see "not participate in ceremonies" and "meaningful alternate activities should be provided."  The message I took from this was that, should families not want kids to participate in Remembrance Day ceremonies, they will be provided related alternatives.  Perhaps it should have read meaningful alternate Remembrance Day activities" for clarity, but for the intended audience of the memo, educators, the meaning was probably clear.  If not, they could always ask.

 

The references at the bottom emphasize Canada's diversity and how that diversity is reflected in our military.  I would imagine this was intentional - part of an educator's job is to encourage critical thinking and careful reflection, which is the opposite of emotional generalizations.  We want youth to recognize that not all Muslims are terrorists from villages in Pakistan.  We want all people, regardless of their faith, skin colour, sexuality or other factor recognized as individuals, not zombies.

 

Asked by a Sun editor if this policy was directed at/requested by specific groups (instead of straight-up question asking what the impetus was), the Board's PR guy Scott Scantlebury took the questions asked and tried to provide an answer he felt reflected the demand.  I think his answer wasn't helpful - the memo didn't touch on religious exemptions, so answering with reference to such a policy wasn't actually answering the question in its context.  This is a good teachable moment for him.

 

Levant, clearly, took the matter in a whole different direction.

 

By his own admission, when he read the bit about alternative activities, he jumped to the conclusion that this meant parents were being given an opportunity for their kids not to recognize Remembrance Day.  Further, when he saw the reference to Muslims, what stood out to him was not an emphasis of diversity, but a religious reference.

 

When Scantlebury did reference the religious exemption policy, he refers to faith "where pacifism is a tenant", which can be read as a subtle reference to Jehovah's Witnesses.  This isn't what Levant took away:

 

“And even if some old bigot from a backwoods village in Pakistan or Somalia doesn’t want to respect Canada, that's where our schools come in and teach those bigots' kids and grandkids what it means to be Canadian."

 

Levant either overlooked or didn't register the mention of pacifism.  Instead, his focus became Muslim, Immigrant, Canada-hater.

 

Again - whether he did this because he saw a potential narrative to exploit or whether he felt incensed is for him to sort out, but I would suggest the fact he was capable of thinking that way was particularly telling.

 

Levant makes a valid point when he says the memo - which wasn't directed at the media - didn't overtly mention safety issues.  It also didn't say anything about immigrant Muslims seeking exemptions because they don't believe in Canada.

 

That was a frame Team Levant constructed for themselves, completely ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

 

Think about that for a second; the memo was about providing children meaningful alternatives to ceremonies, which are public events.  It could just as easily be a child with social anxiety as one with religious motivations.  When religion came up, the reference made by Scantlebury was to pacificst intent, not Canada-hating. 

 

It's a massive leap from meaningful alternatives to backwoods bigots from Pakistan or Somalia, but that is exactly where Levant's mind went to.  Which kinda implies this is what he was looking for.

 

You know the expression "if you go looking for trouble, you're sure to find it?"  There's neurological basis for this.  We are hard-wired to be attracted to things which feel good for us and avoid things we see as threatening.  Emotions are tools that motivate us to respond to our environment.

 

To avoid potential threats, we need to know what and where they are.  This requires a bit of proactive threat identification.  In the same way wild animals will be wary of and keep their distance from people, we will try to be aware of and stay away from (or fight against) what we perceive as threats to us.

 

How do we categorize what's a threat from what isn't, especially in real time?

 

We do this through generalizations.  Certain sensual cues serve as markers that let us know where a threat is - something that looks like a tiger is threatening, and should therefore be avoided.  A car that's going too fast in our vicinity will set off alarm bells.  By the same token, if you have been abused by a person with certain characteristics in your life, you may develop a sense of wariness towards all people with similar characteristics.  These sorts of fears can even be learned.

 

Which brings us back to Levant.  In a memo that had nothing to do with Somali/Pakistani terrorists that that are distinctly un-Canadian, that's exactly where his mind went.  When he saw a picture of a Muslim, an alarm bell went off.  Conclusions were reached that facts don't back.

 

Of course, Levant himself would reject this notion.  He's not a bigot, after all, nor do his fears of the Other control his perception of the world.  He's a rational actor - it's the other guys who are all reactive, who don't do their homework.  All of 'em, together.

Like, say, those lefties in the media party.

 

"But it wasn't long before the other birds in the media party all started squawking the same thing, none of them checking for themselves of course.  The old Media Gang got together in a matter of minutes, each echoing the other's spin, none of them doing any actual research themselves, all making me the story instead of the story that I had reported."

 

To clarify - there's no possibility that multiple independent parties individually came to the same conclusions about Levant being a fearful bigot.  In fact, the more logical argument is that they convened through murmuration and made poor Ezra the target of their attacks.

 

A statement which, I'm sure, Levant carefully researched for accuracy before uttering.

 

In seconds, Levant has dehumanized and generalized people that challenge his views (geese), suggested they are reactive rather than thoughtful and, therefore, a collective threat.  Best of all - he's suggested that he, rather than his statements, is now being targeted by this flock.

 

It's a conspiracy theory that not only isn't evidence-based, it doesn't even make logical sense.

 

But the emotional frame doesn't end there, either.  Levant talks about the Board throwing Scantlebury under the bus (betrayal, abuse of authority, THREAT!) then plays a video where nothing of the kind happens.  What purpose does that bit serve?

 

By concluding that he would "go with the Superintendent's" version, Levant was backing away from his rant.  He couldn't admit that he'd overreacted, though, as that implies he's not as in control as he wants to believe himself to be, so he needed someone else to put in the penalty box.

 

Then Levant took a moment to talk about miscommunication, as in the Board's miscommunication to him.  Communication, of course, isn't a one-way exercise; it requires involved parties to focus on the other person; what they mean and what they're receiving.  You can't have communication without empathy; we tend not to empathize with those we fear as threats.

 

How do we bridge the gap between people with such different lived experiences, though?  What provides the common ground on which we can see each other not as threats, but as peers?

 

National identities do this; so do rituals and symbols.  These are things designed to transcend individuals and tribes to build communities. 

 

Canada is a multicultural country that believes in peace, order and good government.  None of these things are possible without collaboration, which doesn't happen without empathy.

 

Something Ezra Levant should keep in mind.

Choose Consciously

Nature and nurture serve as guiding forces, flinch-reflexes and intuitions leading us in certain directions.  Ultimately, though, we can harness these influences and decide, for ourselves, which inclinations to accept, which to ignore and which bear reflection.

 

We can be in control of our choices - if we're conscious about what informs them. 

The Greater Influence on Teen Behavior – Nature or Nurture? Surprising Answer…

by Dennis E. Coates

 

 

It was one of the coolest weddings I’ve ever attended, the reception turned into a lively celebration, I was doing the kind of dancing I do only after I’ve had way too many drinks, and my friend and I were catching our breath. We were talking about his kids and out of the blue he asked me: “So, where do you land on the question of nature or nurture?”

Ah yes, the old question. Which has more influence on behavior? Nature (the hardware) – your genes take care of that part of it. Nurture (the software) – that’s the job of parents, teachers and mentors. Which has greater influence? My brain had to shift gears away from the raucous music to consider it. But I knew where I stood on the issue, so it didn’t take me long to reply.

 

I shouted into his ear: “In my opinion, it’s neither nature nor nurture. It’s choice. Our genetic inheritance gives us our start-point, our potential and limitations. After that it’s about learning. Like a computer, we upload the software and the data. But ultimately, we’re not driven by either. We make choices. Kids make choices.”

 

“Choices? I never heard that answer before.”

 

“We’re different from animals because we can think, ponder and reflect before we act. It’s not just instinct, habit and stimulus-response. We can make conscious choices. We can decide what we want to do. You take Person A and Person B and you put both people in exactly the same situation, and they may not make the same choices. And their actions will have consequences.”

 

“Choice,” he repeated. He looked a little dazed. I’m pretty sure he had dispatched as many drinks as I had.

 

“We’re responsible for our actions. For what we learn. For what we do. For what we become. For our lives. You can’t account for a person’s actions by saying it’s something he’s born with, and you can’t say the world programmed him to do it. We choose to do what we do.”

 

I don’t remember all the details of that night, but I it seems to me my friend changed the subject.

The question he asked is an important one, and it’s worth discussing. But you don’t have to take my answer as the final word. Check out this brief video featuring author Stephen Covey.

The Sin of Committing Sociology

Like them, we embrace the “sin” of employing data in aid of a proactive public policy that fosters a sustainable and equitable planet. We urge all Canadians to do the same.

 

 

I think they hit the nail on the head by comparing proactive public policy (often considered "social engineering" by the political right as though windshield wipers, organized waste collection/removal and inoculations were bad things) as sinful.

 

Original Sin, after all, was biting into the apple of knowledge.  That sin led to the expulsion from paradise.  What better metaphor could there be for the development of theory of mind and a sense of isolation from the world we live in?

 

Reactive vs Proactive.  Understanding and dealing with root causes vs whacking whatever mole is in front of you.  Fear vs hope.

 

There's a reason I keep telling people mental health is about more than just illness.

Marketers exploiting secrets of the living brain (Kelly Crowe)

 

Marketers exploiting secrets of the living brain

 

The same primitive impulses that helped early man survive against the evolutionary odds are drawing shopper Denam Drew to a pair of tan suede shoes. At least that's the theory behind neuromarketing, an emerging field that uses the tools of neuroscience to understand the secrets of the consumer brain.

 

Drew is holding the shoe in his hand while researcher Adam Spadaro stands behind him watching his brain waves light up a computer screen in colourful flares of red, yellow and green. All of this is possible because Drew is wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap with electrodes placed all over his head, recording the electrical impulses on the surface of his brain. He's also wearing eye tracking goggles to reveal exactly what he's looking at when the computer records a flash of emotion.

The human brain A region-by-region exploration of how the brain functions

 

"The goggles use the pupils as a reference point to track where your eyes are looking and wherever the eyes go, that's a measure of the attention of the brain and that's key information for marketers," Spadaro says. He's completing a PhD in cognitive psychology at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, but at the same time he's using his scientific knowledge to help get one of Canada's first neuromarketing companies off the ground.

 

"It would be really useful for a brand to know if this product is or is not capturing a consumer's attention," Spadaro says, struggling to balance his laptop computer in the middle of the shoe store and, at the same time, monitor the flashing images of Drew's brain on the screen.

 

"It's really giving you a lot of insight into his emotional response, much more so than if you were just to ask him how he’s feeling. Sometimes you can get a truer response to his emotion. That offers a lot of insight that neuroscience has been taking advantage of for several decades now and marketers are now beginning to take advantage of it."

 

Neuromarketer Diana Lucaci adjusts eye tracking goggles on shopper Denam Drew. Lucaci uses new technologies to measure consumers' engagement, attention and memory. () (CBC)

 

Diana Lucaci is also here at this Toronto shopping centre to supervise the research. She is the founder of True Impact Marketing, which she says is the first and only neuromarketing research company in Canada that uses both EEG and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to try to read consumers' minds. Her company owns the EEG cap and eye tracking goggles, but when she wants to use an fMRI machine, she has to buy time from hospitals and universities.

 

"The three key metrics we measure are engagement, attention, and memory," she says. "We're able to measure levels of positive and negative emotion as well. A company would want to know if its brand elicits a particular emotional response, if it's positive or negative at a particular point in time," she says. "That is invaluable information for marketers because it takes a lot of guess-work out. You're not launching a campaign and crossing your fingers hoping you know what your customers feel and what they want."

 

"My formal education is in neuroscience from the University of Toronto," she says, "following that, I've worked progressively in roles in marketing and communications."

 

"As a marketer, I always wanted better tools before we went to market with a campaign. When you know that a campaign requires millions of dollars and putting it together takes months and months, and the only data you have is a survey, and often you don’t even have that, so you just cross your fingers and hope that people pay attention."

 

Traditional market research has always tried to analyze how consumers think and feel about a product or a brand, using focus groups and surveys. The problem is, sometimes consumers don't tell the truth. "In focus groups, what often happens is that you get people skewing their answer to what they think the marketer wants to hear or what will make them sound better in front of the other participants," Lucaci says.

 

But what if advertisers could bypass the thinking brain and see what's going on at a more primitive emotional level? The theory is that consumer motivation starts there, with a series of brain chemical triggers rooted in primal neural circuits that evolved to help humans make decisions that would help or hinder survival. Assuming consumer choice is not purely rational, but rather is strongly biased by emotion, neuromarketers believe that if they can read pleasure or disinterest at this unconscious level, they can better predict what consumers will buy or avoid.

How the brain makes consumer choices

One of the few studies to examine the brain activity of consumer choice attempted to answer an old marketing question: why do some people say they like Coke better than Pepsi?

 

Dr. Reid Montague, at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, scanned the brains of test subjects while they tasted Coke and Pepsi. During the blind taste test, the brain imaging showed that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was active. "This area of the brain is strongly implicated in signaling basic appetitive aspects of reward," Montague wrote. So when the test subjects didn't know the brand name of the particular sweet, black liquid they were tasting, their brains processed the choice based on taste.

 

What if advertisers could bypass the thinking brain and see what's going on at a more primitive emotional level?

 

When Montague asked the subjects which one they liked better, they were equally split between Coke and Pepsi. But when Montague repeated the taste test, this time showing the test subjects a Coke can and telling them they were tasting Coke, suddenly new brain areas got involved: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and the midbrain, areas that have been associated with memory and based on emotion.

 

"There is a dramatic effect of the Coke label on subjects' behavioural preference," Montague wrote in his paper. Once they knew they were drinking coke, the test subjects said they preferred Coke in the labelled cups significantly more than unlabelled Coke and more than Pepsi.

 

"We hypothesize that cultural information biases preference decisions," he concluded.

 

Lucaci cites this study as proof that consumer choice is not based on a rational judgment of which product is superior. "So what that tells us is that people regardless of their brain telling them, 'this tastes better,' people have a positive brand association with a product that overpowers the emotion of taste," Lucaci says.

Neuromarketing raises ethical questions

What does Montague think about the emerging field of neuromarketing, after this research?

 

"Neuromarketing could be a legitimate pursuit especially in areas where one wants to determine how much someone values a product," he said in an email. "In neuroimaging, this is a rapidly developing area — the study of valuation (not neuromarketing per se) — and there are many possible uses. For example, it may be possible to produce neural focus-group approaches to certain aspects of branding, desirability, and so on. Such approaches could in principle be cheaper and more reliable than other focus group methods."

 

"However, I do not see this kind of approach supplanting anything. A person's purchase behaviour will always be paramount and the brain science will continue to develop."

 

But are there any ethical issues that should be considered? Could neuromarketing data be used to manipulate consumer behaviour?

 

People need to be aware of neuromarketing and its ethical implications, said Ruth Lanius. (CBC)

 

"Of course you can influence the brain," said Ruth Lanius, a neuroscientist at Western University in London, Ontario, in an interview. "I think it's interesting, how can we influence the brain at an implicit level, to get you more interested in something."

 

"It's something that definitely has ethical implications that need to be reviewed and discussed, and that people need to be made aware of," she told me.

 

In an interview, Queen's University behavioural neuroscientist Richard Beninger was asked if he believed the developments in neuroscience could be used to unconsciously influence human behaviour.

 

"I'm interested to understand how the brain works, that's what’s driven me for decades," he told me. "I find it difficult to say well I’m going to stop doing neuroscience because what we’re going to find is going to be so powerful, we're going to be able to change the course of mankind. As one small scientist with one small lab, it's hard to think that I’m going to have some big impact like you're talking about. But perhaps I have to start thinking about these things."

 

"We're learning more all the time and with knowledge, comes power, and with knowledge comes the potential to abuse the knowledge," he said.

 

Back in the shoe store, watching Drew scanning the shelves wearing eye tracking goggles, Lucaci dismisses these concerns.

 

"It's not any more dangerous than running a survey and asking people what they think and pressing a button to pick what product they like," she said. "This time, though, we’re seeing the reaction without having to ask them anything. It’s a lot cleaner in that regard."

 

"It's literally impossible to design a super ad that will make people want to buy something they don't want to buy. The brain simply doesn't work like that," she says.

 

How did Drew feel about people watching his brain while he looked at shoes?

 

“It's a little weird but it’s not too invasive. I don't have too crazy reactions to shoes," he said, walking through the mall with his head wired up in an EEG cap and still wearing the eye tracking goggles.

 

All of this is just the beginning of neuromarketing in Canada. So far Lucaci's company has only one client, and she won't reveal the name until later next year when she intends to publish a case study. But the industry is growing. The first Neuromarketing World Forum was held last April in Amsterdam. And the Neuromarketing Science and Business Association says there are now more than 75 companies doing neuromarketing research all over the world.

 

This is the first in a four part series called Inside Your Brain on CBC's The National, World at Six, and CBC.ca exploring how modern neuroscience is changing the way we think about the way we think. In part two, Kelly Crowe discovers how an ancient system in our living brains can explain our cravings for food, sex and relationships.

Cognitive Dissonance and Neutral Ethnicity: A Bank Note Bafflegab

 

When The Canadian Press broke the story about the erasure last August, spokesman Jeremy Harrison said the Bank of Canada was striving for “neutral ethnicity” in its depictions of people on bank notes.

 

 

What does a traditional Canadian look like?  What is traditional Canadian iconography?  While there is absolutely value in having a consistent national identity that nurtures common ground and fosters a society comfortable with collaboration, there's a big risk in trying to present that image as static. 

 

Of course we know that Aboriginal people predated Europeans - but how often do we stop to think about migration patterns since then?  The first Europeans to settle Upper and Lower Canada were not the same that settled, say, Newfoundland or the Prairies.  The customs, culture and languages of the regions that became Canada were different from the outset.

 

You could argue that whatever the country looked like at Confederation is how it should remain - a notion perhaps alluded to by Conservatives who feel the need to "undo the damage" done by Pierre Elliot Trudeau to their authentic Canadian ideal.  Alas, the world has changed a bit since Confederation and the socio-cultural equivalent of horses and bayonets simply aren't sufficient to meet the modern need. 

 

Even when you look at the developmental tastes of our society over time, they have changed independently of what government does.  I don't feel that immutable tradition is being desecrated by Tories who depict a Santa dressed in blue - but then I know how the whole Jolly Elf thing started in the first place.

 

The very idea of an unwavering "national" tradition or a static "national" identity is fabricated.  Even within families, traditions are modified over time to match the tastes of new generations and the availability of resources at hand.  It's a fascinating thing to see traditions that stemmed out of practicalities (superstitions like holding one's breath while walking past a cemetery or customs like the Korean show of respect in touching one's wrist while shaking hands or pouring tea) carry on long after their original purpose has been lost.

 

What's even more fascinating, though discouraging, is the related trend of solving cognitive dissonance (the holding of two opposing views, such as "I'm not racist" but "I don't take a South Asian male seriously as a leadership candidate") with confabulation.  Case in point - if seeing a non-Caucasian female doctor on a bank note makes you feel uncomfortable, but you don't want to believe it's because the notion of an ethnic other taking over a piece of official iconography feels threatening, you can simply say it's "non-traditional" and revert to a "neutral ethnicity" like your own.  Think I'm exaggerating?  Look at Fox and Friend's response to Crayola introducing varied skin-tone coloured markers.

 

Or, look at the whole Barack Obama birther movement, now apparently the anti-Colin Powell movement, too.  Here's the ironic bit - as society has increasingly stigmatized stigma, we've put increased pressure on people to not identify themselves as a perceived negative, such as being stigmatic.  But we all stigmatize, to some degree; it's a natural limbic response to external stimuli.  Hating haters is a form of stigmatisim itself.

 

Like any phobia, stigma can be overcome, but only when you recognize you have it, like a medical condition.  Fear is no different than vision impairment or asthma; natural but manageable, with the right tools of accommodation.
 

Which is why I think that Kathleen Wynne, herself a breaker of traditional models, has it right:

 

"I want to thank all of those who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of equality ... and everyone who has contributed to this moment and others like it, by refusing to be guided by prejudice or by doubt."

 

Change, like age, is not a choice; even our own tastes will vary over time.  We can try to deny it and cling to traditions, but scratch the surface a bit and you'll find those traditions aren't as solid as you think they are, either.  Reacting to uncertainty with fear is natural, but how we respond to that fear is entirely up to us - when we're conscious of how and why it exists.

 

What can lie in our control is how we respond to change - but only when we're conscious of how those responses are shaped.  When you refuse to give in to fear, you push it out of the driver's seat.  Like going to the gym, though, emotional control is something you constantly have to work at.

 

And that, I think, is something worth noting.

The Choices of Mayor Ford

Mayor Rob Ford broke ranks with his council allies and voted against a part of his own budget Tuesday.


"I don't understand why he did it."
    - Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong

"It is the best budget in North America."
   - Councillor Doug Ford

"It's interesting to note that he voted against the budget that he got up and spoke about in glowing terms."
   - Councillor Gord Perks

Not the leadership we deserve, but the bullish, plain-talk functional fixedness we asked for.