Unlike this president, John Kennedy was an ironist who never fell for his own mystique.

The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.

The nation’s faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.

There is nothing surprising about where Mr. Obama finds himself today. He had been made by charisma, and political magic, and has been felled by it. If his rise had been spectacular, so, too, has been his fall. The speed with which some of his devotees have turned on him—and their unwillingness to own up to what their infatuation had wrought—is nothing short of astounding. But this is the bargain Mr. Obama had made with political fortune.

He was a blank slate, and devotees projected onto him what they wanted or wished. In the manner of political redeemers who have marked—and wrecked—the politics of the Arab world and Latin America, Mr. Obama left the crowd to its most precious and volatile asset—its imagination. There was no internal coherence to the coalition that swept him to power. There was cultural “cool” and racial absolution for the white professional classes who were the first to embrace him. There was understandable racial pride on the part of the African-American community that came around to his banners after it ditched the Clinton dynasty.

The white working class had been slow to be convinced. The technocracy and elitism of Mr. Obama’s campaign—indeed of his whole persona—troubled that big constituency, much more, I believe, than did his race and name. The promise of economic help, of an interventionist state that would salvage ailing industries and provide a safety net for the working poor, reconciled these voters to a candidate they viewed with a healthy measure of suspicion. He had been caught denigrating them as people “clinging to their guns and religion,” but they had forgiven him.

Mr. Obama himself authored the tale of his own political crisis. He had won an election, but he took it as a plebiscite granting him a writ to remake the basic political compact of this republic.

Mr. Obama’s self-regard, and his reading of his mandate, overwhelmed all restraint. The age-old American balance between a relatively small government and a larger role for the agencies of civil society was suddenly turned on its head. Speed was of the essence to the Obama team and its allies, the powerful barons in Congress. Better ram down sweeping social programs—a big liberal agenda before the people stirred to life again.

Progressives pressed for a draconian attack on the workings of our health care, and on the broader balance between the state and the marketplace. The economic stimulus, ObamaCare, the large deficits, the bailout package for the automobile industry—these, and so much more, were nothing short of a fundamental assault on the givens of the American social compact.

And then there was the hubris of the man at the helm: He was everywhere, and pronounced on matters large and small. This was political death by the teleprompter.

Americans don’t deify their leaders or hang on their utterances, but Mr. Obama succumbed to what the devotees said of him: He was the Awaited One. A measure of reticence could have served him. But the flight had been heady, and in the manner of Icarus, Mr. Obama flew too close to the sun.

We have had stylish presidents, none more so than JFK. But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique. Mr. Obama’s self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the “remoteness and detachment” of his governing style. We don’t have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.

In this extraordinary tale of hubris undone, the Europeans—more even than the people in Islamic lands—can be assigned no small share of blame. They overdid the enthusiasm for the star who had risen in America.

It was the way in Paris and Berlin (not to forget Oslo of course) of rebuking all that played out in America since 9/11—the vigilance, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sense that America’s interests and ways were threatened by a vengeful Islamism. But while the Europeans and Muslim crowds hailed him, they damned his country all the same. For his part, Mr. Obama played along, and in Ankara, Cairo, Paris and Berlin he offered penance aplenty for American ways.

But no sooner had the country recovered its poise, it drew a line for Mr. Obama. The “bluest” of states, Massachusetts, sent to Washington a senator who had behind him three decades of service in the National Guard, who proclaimed his pride in his “army values” and was unapologetic in his assertion that it was more urgent to hunt down terrorists than to provide for their legal defense.

Then the close call on Christmas Day at the hands of the Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab demonstrated that the terrorist threat had not receded. The president did his best to recover: We are at war, he suddenly proclaimed. Nor were we in need of penance abroad. Rumors of our decline had been exaggerated. The generosity of the American response to Haiti, when compared to what India and China had provided, was a stark reminder that this remains an exceptional nation that needs no apologies in distant lands.

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A historical hallmark of “isms” and charismatic movements is to dig deeper when they falter—to insist that the “thing” itself, whether it be Peronism, or socialism, etc., had not been tried but that the leader had been undone by forces that hemmed him in.

It is true to this history that countless voices on the left now want Obama to be Obama. The economic stimulus, the true believers say, had not gone astray, it only needed to be larger; the popular revolt against ObamaCare would subside if and when a new system was put in place.

There had been that magical moment—the campaign of 2008—and the true believers want to return to it. But reality is merciless. The spell is broken.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author of “The Foreigner’s Gift” (Free Press, 2007).

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704094304575029110104772360.html

The Jackal has a brand to protect.

Life for terrorists is improving in the U.S., with the Detroit bomber enjoying his right to remain silent and negotiate a plea bargain, while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his Guantanamo mates head for a civilian trial. At least we can say America hasn’t gone as far as France to accommodate enemy combatants.

On Thursday, a court outside Paris will rule on a claim lodged by one Ilich Ramírez Sánchez. Better known as Carlos the Jackal, the 60-year-old Venezuelan was the Osama bin Laden of the 1970s and 1980s. On behalf of Palestinian and various Marxist-Leninist causes, Ramírez organized and carried out a series of notable terrorist attacks. The French finally nabbed him from a Sudanese hospital in 1994 and jailed him for life for the murder of two French policemen and a Lebanese informant. Carlos the Jackal now spends his time invoking his rights under the French constitution.

In the case before the court in Nanterre, he and long-time lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who also married him, are suing a French production company for the right to review and “correct and edit” a forthcoming made-for-TV film about him entitled “Carlos.” Ms. Coutant-Peyre alleges the filmmakers are out to “demolish Carlos.” Her client wants to protect the intellectual property rights to his name and “biographical image.” The court has taken this case seriously enough to hear it.

A lawyer for the film company, Film en Stock, asked the Libération daily in Paris, “How could we possibly tarnish the image of Carlos when he himself claims to have killed some 2,000 people?” There’s also the small matter of a right to free press and speech that should, one would assume, shield the filmmakers from a litigious terrorist.

Still, the compatriot who Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez last year hailed as “a revolutionary soldier” may be on to something. Carlos has an experienced nose for the zeitgeist. How long can it be before some American lawyer tries to safeguard KSM’s “biographical image”?

Editorial, Wall Street Journal

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703906204575027264127967140.html

At the centre of a recent custody battle in Sarasota County Circuit Court, Florida sat the exceptionally cute Eli. He is only 11-months old, still in nappies and does not understand the legal fight over him between James Casey and Virginia Valbuena. Of course, it’s always difficult for someone so young to understand litigation but for Eli it is especially challenging because he is a chimpanzee.

Eli has lived with Valbuena in Florida for most of his life. According to her, Eli is from a wildlife park in California. She says she collected him from his owners when they brought him over to a chimpanzee habitat in Missouri – a mutually convenient meeting place. Valbuena is training Eli for a Hollywood company.

However, Casey, who brought this legal action, claims that Eli was born on a chimpanzee habitat he used to run with his wife in Missouri – the same habitat from which Valbuena picked up her chimp.

In divorce proceedings, Casey’s wife had been ordered not to sell any of their animals but, Casey says, she violated that court order by selling Eli, who is worth $65,000, to Valbuena.

Chimpanzees do not have birth certificates and proving their parentage is difficult so Casey brought this action to obtain an order for Eli to be given a DNA test. Casey’s lawyer argued that “If it’s good for the state of Florida to execute people based on DNA evidence, I think its good enough to determine the lineage of this animal”.

An initial dispute arose about whether it would be okay for a chimpanzee to attend court. Valbuena promised that Eli would be well-behaved – apart from sleeping all he likes to do is kiss and cuddle. Valbuena said that lawyers would not be able to tell the difference between Eli and a baby “unless they looked closely”. In the event, Eli had to wait outside the court while people inside went ape.

The court heard that here were several reasons why Casey held a bona fide belief that Eli was his: the age and appearance of the chimp, and a previous business relationship between his ex-wife and Valbuena. Casey’s lawyer said that “the only way to be 100 per cent certain of the provenance of the animal is for the court to order a DNA test” and for the results to be compared with those of other chimpanzees in Missouri. That proposal was opposed by Valbuena’s lawyer on the basis that, unlike similar tests run by the Department of Revenue in child paternity cases, the potential for fraud in a chimp case would be “off the charts”.

Judge Roberts dismissed the case but said he was open to another application from Casey in future if more evidence was provided that Eli was his property. This case is not the first to involve a chimpanzee. One has even been a client. In a California case in 1999 a court agreed that a San Francisco lawyer could represent a chimpanzee called Moe – he is still much-loved in San Francisco for his fun, energy and cheeky manoeuvres, and so is the chimp.

Gary Slapper is Professor of Law at The Open University.

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Full article: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/columnists/article7008088.ece

Why the Arab world is re-embracing the poetry of the desert

She is the dream that scatters with the sun, Absorbed into flame and flame absorbing, Eternal motion one with endless peace, The camel has no was or will be, only being.

The above lines are the final stanza of a poem I recently completed, a rousing work titled “Spirit of the Sand.” The poem contains 24 lines in all, each expressing a mystical appreciation for the Arabian camel. To be honest, I’m not sure I really believe that the dromedary’s heart beats in every chest, nor that it carries on its back the thirst of generations. In fact, I don’t really like the animal that much. I do, however, like the idea of winning a brand new Range Rover.

As I write this, there’s a festival underway in a remote corner of the United Arab Emirates, where I live, to celebrate traditional local culture. The centerpiece of the event – along with (no kidding) a camel beauty contest – is a camel-themed poetry competition, the winner of which will drive away in a luxury SUV. “Hey, you write poetry,” said my wife when she saw the announcement for the competition. “Write one.” For the past few months, we’ve been driving around in a Toyota Yaris. I started writing.

The winners of the competition are due to be announced the first week of February, but I don’t hold out much hope. The problem isn’t so much that I’m not a camel person – I can wing that – but that you are required to write your poem in the Nabati style. Nabati is an ancient form of Arabic folk poetry passed down through generations of Bedouin tribesmen. In order to write a Nabati camel poem properly, you need to have not only seen one of the animals, but to have milked one, scrubbed one, maybe had one spit in your face. This dusty traditionalism is the whole point of the contest.

It’s an odd thing, but you could say that camel spit has been making a comeback in the United Arab Emirates recently. The proud home of the world’s tallest building, the world’s largest man-made island, and the world’s highest Swarovski-crystal-per-capita ratio is currently in the throes of a full-fledged Nabati craze. People in the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi zoom home in their BMWs to watch “Million’s Poet,” a televised Nabati talent show whose ultimate winner gets a $1,362,000 cash prize, along with the kind of rock-star celebrity that poets elsewhere in the world can only dream about. Since it launched a few years back, “Million’s Poet” has become the Arab world’s answer to “American Idol.” Across the region, tens of millions of people tune in each week to vote for their favorite versifier via text message. Even the kids are hooked: Internet message boards ring with heated debate over who’s the best (or cutest) poet in the land. Nabati action figures cannot be far behind.

“Millions Poet,” as frivolous as it may seem, is taken very seriously by the United Arab Emirates’ rulers. The government funds and promotes the show as part of a broader effort to reestablish Nabati as the cultural cornerstone of the country. This effort, in turn, is born of a much larger concern. As satellite dishes and skyscrapers proliferate, there is a growing sense here that local traditions are being swept away. In some Arabic nations – the ones you tend to read about in the papers – this concern has led to a pervasive and restrictive form of Islam: The rise of ultra-conservative Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia represents an emphatic example. The United Arab Emirates, characteristically, has opted for a more moderate approach. Putting Nabati poetry under lights is seen here as a perfect way to stave off a collective identity crisis, to remind nationals who they are – or at least who they once were.

Nabati poetry is so old, nobody really knows how old it is. We do know that the form dates back at least 1,000 years, and was first practiced by the Bedouins who roamed the deserts of the Arabian peninsula. For centuries, it was the only way for these people to record their victories in battle, their humiliations in love, the weaseliness of their enemies, and the munificence of their leaders. It’s a form of social history for people who didn’t have pens, but who loved a singsong around the campfire.

The Arab world has a classical, bookish poetry tradition that is renowned for its litany of migraine-inducing formalities. Nabati is to this tradition what break dancing is to the minuet. It’s meant to be loose-limbed and spontaneous, recited in everyday language, expressing common concerns. Its rules are negotiable; if it sounds good over a plate of al harees, you’re in. And while Nabati themes do occasionally tend toward the lyrical – “My Heart Is Set Ablaze By Anxieties” by Si’dun Al Waji comes to mind – you’re just as likely to hear a poem about whose goats have been encroaching on whose territory. “Nabati,” says Ghassan Al Hassan, a Nabati scholar and a “Million’s Poet” judge, “speaks the language of the common people.”

The language of the people has changed over the last millennium, as have their concerns. Ancient Bedouin tribesmen were a notoriously bellicose bunch; titles like “By God, How Often Have I Raided” and “So What, Ibn Slem, If You Attack?” were commonplace. Today, while Nabati’s macho tendencies endure, poets tend to focus less on the power of their horses than the horsepower of their pickups. Tribalism has given way to nationalism. And where a traditional Nabati poet might have sung about his ability to use his fists, today’s will more likely talk up the goal-scoring abilities of his favorite soccer team.

The United Arab Emirates’ ruling classes, again, are spearheading the drive to shoehorn Nabati into contemporary contexts. The pop-culture glam of the “Million’s Poet” show is no accident: It represents a concerted effort to present the Nabati tradition in a format that the iPhone-owning masses will appreciate and understand. On the academic front, the government last year set up the Abu Dhabi-based Poetry Academy to help foster new Nabati poets and to establish a formal critical apparatus, something that old-school Nabati poets would likely have found mind-boggling.

There has also been a concurrent effort to preserve the tradition in written form, and even to translate it into English – a task akin to translating Italian into fish. Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai and a prolific Nabati poet, last year published a book of English translations of his work, which includes the poem “Oh Victorious Arrow” (“Congratulations Hamdan, heartfelt congratulations/ Your horse for you is happy, strutting proudly”). The fact that the guy who’s currently in charge of running this modern megalopolis should spend his time penning odes to horses is an indication of how important Nabati has become to the emirates’ sense of self.

“Globalization is wreaking havoc on many aspects of local life,” says Sultan Al Amimi, another “Million’s Poet” judge. Nabati, he says, “is a way of preserving this way of life from cultural erosion.”

Cultural erosion is a hot topic in the Middle East right now. The fear of regional identities and values being overrun – by hedonism, materialism, moral relativism, and all the other isms generally associated with the West – lies at the heart of much of the hard-core religious revivalism you see here. In America, there’s talk of the Clash of Civilizations; here, people see themselves as taking a Last Stand, with Mecca as a kind of Alamo.

Few countries in the Middle East have more of a stake in this issue than the United Arab Emirates. In recent decades, the country has seen wave after wave of immigration; Dubai’s expat population is now said to be about 80 percent of its total. And these immigrants have brought with them everything from Tagalog karaoke to Bollywood blockbusters to happy hour cocktails. There are times when it’s easy to forget you’re even in an Arabic country, an extremely worrying fact for people who were born and bred here.

Partly because the United Arab Emirates values its tradition of welcoming outsiders, and partly because people here understand that their economy relies on an inflow of foreign labor, the country has not resorted to the kind of knee-jerk religiosity that some of its neighbors have. Instead, it has embarked on a kinder, gentler form of revival. You can hardly turn around these days without bumping into a heritage village. Faux-traditional architecture is cropping up in every corner of the country. And youngsters who a decade ago might have worn jeans and T-shirts now don the dishdashas and abayas of their forebears. Sure, they’ll wear these garments at shopping malls and go home afterwards to watch the latest episode of “Dexter” – the point is that the country is attempting to incorporate its traditions into the modern world, rather than trying to keep the modern world at bay.

This will not be an easy trick to pull off. Efforts to drag the past into the present will always involve an element of nostalgia, and nostalgia will always involve its own cultural conflicts – as you can already see in the Nabati revival. One contemporary female poet, for instance, writes about “My longing for a tent/ After an adobe house.” We don’t really believe that this woman longs to live in a tent, simply that she likes the idea of it. Her poem is a kind of fib. It also lacks the immediacy of traditional Nabati poetry. Then again, Nabati’s themes have always revolved around traditional desert life. Is a Nabati poem about breaking the heel of your Jimmy Choo still a Nabati poem? And if it is, why shouldn’t a guy who grew up in London write a moving eulogy to the Arabian camel?

It might just be that my own longing – For a brand new Range Rover/ After a Toyota Yaris – isn’t so far-fetched after all.

Chris Wright is an editor and writer living in Dubai.

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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/01/31/o_camel_my_camel/

The case that ‘trial by ordeal’ actually worked

For the better part of a millennium, Europe’s legal systems decided difficult criminal cases in a most peculiar way. When judges were uncertain about an accused criminal’s guilt, they ordered a cauldron of water to be boiled, a ring to be thrown in, and the defendant to plunge in his naked hand and pluck the object out. The defendant’s hand was wrapped in bandages and revisited three days later. If it survived the bubbling cauldron unharmed, the defendant was declared innocent. If it didn’t, he was convicted.

These trials were called “ordeals.” They reached their height between the 9th and 13th centuries, and the methods varied. In one variant, a piece of iron was heated until it was red hot. The defendant picked it up and carried it with her bare hand. In another, the defendant was stripped naked, his hands and feet bound, and he was pushed into a pool of holy water. If the defendant sank, he was acquitted. If he floated, he was condemned.

Modern observers have roundly condemned ordeals for being cruel and arbitrary. Ordeals seem to reflect everything that was wrong with the Dark Ages. They’re an icon of medieval barbarism and backwardness.

But a closer look suggests something very different: The ordeal system worked surprisingly well. It accurately determined who was guilty and who was innocent, sorting genuine criminals from those who had been wrongly accused. Stranger still, the ordeal system suggests that pervasive superstition can be good for society. Medieval legal systems leveraged citizens’ superstitious beliefs through ordeals, making it possible to secure criminal justice where it would have otherwise been impossible to do so. Some superstitions, at least, may evolve and persist for a good reason: They help us accomplish goals we couldn’t otherwise accomplish, or accomplish them more cheaply.

Ordeals were based on a medieval superstition called “iudicium Dei” – the judgment of God. According to this belief, God helped man resolve judicial matters through trials of fire and water. The superstitious “logic” that underlay ordeals was based on divine intervention. God, the thinking went, saved innocent defendants from being burned in hot ordeals and allowed guiltless men to sink in water “over which He hath thundered” in cold ones. The ordeal, then, offered a way for God to render judgment.

How might these trials have worked, without divine intervention? The key insight is that ordeals weren’t just widely practiced. They were widely believed in. It’s this belief – literally, the fear of God – that could have allowed the ordeals to function effectively.

First, consider the reasoning of the defendants. Guilty believers expected God to reveal their guilt by harming them in the ordeal. They anticipated being boiled and convicted. Innocent believers, meanwhile, expected God to protect them in the ordeal. They anticipated escaping unscathed, and being exonerated.

The only defendants who would have been willing to go through with the ordeal were therefore the innocent ones. Guilty defendants would have preferred to avoid the ordeal – by confessing their crimes, settling with their accusers, or fleeing the realm.

The next thing to understand is that clerics administrated ordeals and adjudged their outcomes – and did so under elaborate sets of rules that gave them wide latitude to manipulate the process. Priests knew that only innocent defendants would be willing to plunge their hands in boiling water. So priests could simply rig trials to exonerate defendants who were willing to go through with the ordeal. The rituals around the ordeals gave them plenty of cover to ensure the water wasn’t boiling, or the iron wasn’t burning, and so on. If rigging failed, a priest could interpret the ordeal’s outcome to exculpate the defendant nonetheless (“His arm is healing well!”).

The ordeal system was only as strong as the superstitious belief underlying it. So, over time, as people’s belief that God was behind ordeals weakened, so did ordeals’ power to satisfactorily deal with criminal defendants. One crucially important contributor to this decline was the Catholic Church. In the early 13th century, Pope Innocent III spearheaded a damning denunciation of ordeals on the grounds that ordeals were antithetical to Christian doctrine. His edict banned priests from further involvement with them. The Church’s condemnation of ordeals seriously undermined the superstition on which ordeals relied. If ordeals were antithetical to Christianity, how could God reveal defendants’ guilt or innocence through trials of fire and water?

Ordeals disappeared from Europe after Pope Innocent III’s decree. But, while they lasted, they improved criminal justice. Ordeals are inferior to modern trial methods because modern defendants don’t believe in iudicium Dei, not because trial by jury is inherently superior. If modern citizens did have the superstitious belief required for ordeals to work, it might make sense to bring back the cauldrons of boiling water.

Jury trials are expensive. Ordeals cost something, too. But they don’t require days or weeks of a half dozen or more jurors’ time. Nor do they require lawyers. If the strength of superstitious belief required for ordeals to work as well as trial by jury existed, society could use ordeals to secure the same degree of criminal justice for a fraction of the current system’s cost. Consider the savings society would enjoy if citizens firmly believed that an invisible, omniscient, and omnipotent being would severely punish them and their families, not just in an afterlife, but in this one as well, for cheating, stealing, and dishonesty. In the superstitious society, “irrational” beliefs do part of the work that government institutions of law and order do in the nonsuperstitious one.

This insight may help explain the prominence of superstition in some societies. Many societies weren’t, and in some cases still aren’t, wealthy enough to create strong, effective, and more expensive state-made institutions of order. Superstition’s prominence in such societies may reflect the need to rely on cheaper substitutes for such institutions, substitutes such as beliefs in curses, afterlives, and iudicium Dei.

If this is right, it’s not only that scientific advance crowds out superstition. As societies become wealthier, superstitions become less necessary. So people abandon them. This creates the space required for scientific understandings to emerge.

Still, even the wealthiest societies have room for, and can leverage, superstition. To see this, look no further than the practice of oath swearing in courts in the United States. Oath swearing has an even longer history than ordeals. In ordeals’ heyday, elaborate forms of oath taking, sometimes taken with others called “compurgators,” were often the first resort for judicial questions.

Oath swearing survives today. No doubt part of the reason for this is that the superstition underlying its ability to promote justice has survived, too. Historically, oaths were sworn on the Bible, or other holy books, to God. For people who believe God frowns on lying, oath swearing can be a powerful force encouraging truthful testimony. In 1961 the US Supreme Court upheld individuals’ right to testify in court without swearing an oath. But it remains common to ask people providing testimony to do so, or at least to promise to tell the truth. While the explicit invocation of God is all but gone from modern oaths, the solemnity of the oath itself remains strong.

Previous researchers have found evidence that certain superstitious beliefs may be socially productive in modern societies. Important work by Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary of Harvard University, for example, finds that stronger beliefs in an afterlife are associated with higher economic growth. Similarly, in a recent experimental study, Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan of the University of British Columbia find that when “God concepts” are activated in the minds of experiment participants, they’re more cooperative with one another. One of the potential reasons for this result, Shariff and Norenzayan point out, is that individuals may be more likely to behave in socially positive ways when they feel that God is watching them.

Of course, not all superstitious beliefs are socially productive. Besides encouraging criminals to reveal themselves and witnesses to tell the truth, superstition can create conflict and inhibit economic activities that create wealth. Especially if it’s hard to hold productive superstitions separately from unproductive ones, superstition might retard rather than promote social progress.

Still, it’s useful to bear in mind that many bizarre and seemingly irrational beliefs emerged for a reason and, at one time, served a socially useful purpose. Even modern superstitions aren’t all bad. Some may actually make us better off.

Now, where did that cauldron go?

Peter T. Leeson is visiting professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory, author of the paper ”Ordeals,” and author of the recent book ”The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates” (Princeton University Press, 2009).  

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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/01/31/justice_medieval_style/

How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel

Imagine that your stockbroker – or the friend who’s always giving you stock tips – called and told you he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to-earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window. The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce.

This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.

One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called “cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.

Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.

Because it shapes our thinking in so many ways, fluency is implicated in decisions about everything from the products we buy to the people we find attractive to the candidates we vote for – in short, in any situation where we weigh information. It’s a key part of the puzzle of how feelings like attraction and belief and suspicion work, and what researchers are learning about fluency has ramifications for anyone interested in eliciting those emotions.

“Every purchase you make, every interaction you have, every judgment you make can be put along a continuum from fluent to disfluent,” says Adam Alter, a psychologist at the New York University Stern School who co-wrote the paper on fluency and stock prices. “If you can understand how fluency influences judgment, you can understand many, many, many different kinds of judgments better than we do at the moment.”

A handful of scholars have already started to explore the ways that advertisers, educators, political campaigners, or anyone else in the business of persuasion can use these findings. And some of the implications are surprising. For example, to get people to think through a question, it may be best to present it less clearly. And to boost your self-confidence, you may want to set out to write a dauntingly long list of all the reasons why you’re a failure.

Our sensitivity to – and affinity for – fluency is an adaptive shortcut. According to psychologists, it helps us apportion limited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our attention and we have to quickly figure out which are worth thinking about.

Most of the time, the shortcut works pretty well. If something feels notably easy to decipher, whether it’s a piece of text or the shape of an object or the particulars of a person’s face, there’s a good chance it’s because we’ve previously done the work of processing it, and that it’s something we’ve encountered before. Cognitive fluency signals familiarity – some psychologists argue that the eerie experience of déjà vu is simply when we’re fooled by the unexpected ease of taking in a piece of sensory information, and interpret that as a memory of having been there or seen it before.

An instinctive preference for the familiar made sense in the prehistoric environment in which our brains developed, psychologists hypothesize. Unfamiliar things – whether they were large woolly animals, plants we were thinking of eating, or fellow human beings – needed to be carefully evaluated to determine whether they were friend or foe. Familiar objects were those we’d already passed judgment on, so it made sense not to waste time and energy scrutinizing them.

According to Norbert Schwarz, a leading fluency researcher, the late psychologist Robert Zajonc used to explain the evolutionary logic behind this tendency succinctly. “He’d say, ‘If it is familiar, it has not eaten you yet.’ ”

“That gut feeling of familiarity determined by ease of processing is a very effective shorthand,” says Schwarz, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. “Having to sit down and analyze every time whether something is familiar would not be a good idea.”

Our bias for the familiar, however, can be triggered in settings where there’s little purpose to it. In the 1960s, Zajonc did a series of experiments that uncovered what he dubbed the “mere exposure” effect: He found that, with stimuli ranging from nonsense words to abstract geometric patterns to images of faces to Chinese ideographs (the test subjects, being non-Chinese speakers, didn’t know what the ideographs meant), all it took to get people to say they liked certain ones more than others was to present them multiple times.

More recent work suggests that people assign all sorts of specific characteristics to things that feel familiar. Like beauty. Psychologists have identified what they call the “beauty-in-averageness” effect – when asked to identify the most attractive example of something, people tend to choose the most prototypical option. For example, when asked to identify the most appealing of a group of human faces, people choose the one that is a composite of all the others. And it’s not just faces: Studies have found a similar tendency when people are asked to identify what makes for an attractive dog or car or watch. Some psychologists suggest that much of what we perceive as beauty is just the fact that the most prototypical faces and dogs and watches are the easiest to process, because they share the most with all the other faces and dogs and watches that we’ve seen and stored in our perceptual inventory.

“These faces fit right in there. In effect, you’ve already learned the facial features, so people like them,” says Piotr Winkielman, a psychologist at the University of California San Diego who has done research on fluency and attractiveness.

Winkielman doesn’t claim that beauty is entirely explained by fluency, but he argues that the effect is powerful, all the more so because we’re unaware of it. Indeed, the power of the effect, combined with the ease with which psychologists can fool people into mistaking the sensation of fluency for actual familiarity, helps explain the current popularity of research into the phenomenon.

“People are very sensitive to the experience of ease or difficulty, but very insensitive to where that feeling comes from,” says Schwarz.

One thing that fools us, for example, is font. When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about. Schwarz and his former student Hyunjin Song have found that when people read about an exercise regimen or a recipe in a less legible font, they tend to rate the exercise regimen more difficult and the recipe more complicated than if they read about them in a clearer font.

Playing with legibility can also change perceptions in subtler, less predictable ways. Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton University who also co-wrote the stocks and fluency paper, have found that when a personal questionnaire is presented in a less legible font, people tend to answer it less honestly than if it is written in a more legible one. Alter and two other psychologists, Simon Laham and Geoffrey Goodwin, also found that, when presenting people with written descriptions of moral transgressions, increasing the contrast between text and background to make it easier to read the description made people more forgiving.

To Alter, it’s a demonstration not so much of the power of fluency but of its opposite, what psychologists call “disfluency.” Even at the level of a trickier font, the experience of disfluency makes people wary and uncomfortable. That sensation, Alter argues, is enough to make them less forthcoming and also less forgiving in their moral judgments.

“Disfluency functions as a cognitive alarm,” Alter says. “It sets up a cognitive roadblock and makes people think, and it triggers a sense of risk and concern.”

It isn’t just visual cues that have this sort of effect. Matthew McGlone, a psychologist at the University of Texas, has found that auditory cues can shape people’s perception of truth. McGlone did a study in which he presented subjects with a series of unfamiliar aphorisms either in rhyming or nonrhyming form: “Woes unite foes,” for example, versus “Woes unite enemies.” He found that people tended to see the rhyming ones as more accurate than the nonrhyming ones, despite the fact that, substantively, the two were identical. Phrases that are easier on the ear aren’t just catchy and easy to remember, McGlone argues, they also feel inherently truer. He calls it “the rhyme-as-reason effect.”

The persuasive power of repetition, clarity, and simplicity is something that people who set out to win others’ trust – marketers, political candidates, speechwriters, suitors, and teachers – already have an intuitive sense of if they’re good at what they do. What the fluency research is showing is just how profound the effect can be, and just how it works.

And some of the more interesting ramifications of the new work come from the suggestion that disfluency, rather than fluency, can sometimes be what’s called for. Work on product marketing by Schwarz and Hyejeung Cho has found, for example, that while creating a sense of disfluency in potential consumers is likely to make them see a product as less familiar, it also makes them see it as more innovative.

And a few studies suggest that disfluency works well as a prompt to get people to think carefully and catch mistakes. Alter and Oppenheimer found that using a more difficult font can get students to do better on the Cognitive Reaction Test, a three-question test that usually trips up people answering intuitively. In another study, they found that disfluency also led people to think more abstractly. Schwarz and Song found that a difficult font can dramatically increase the number of people who correctly respond to the question, “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?” (The answer is “none” – Moses wasn’t on the Ark.)

In other words, to get people to think carefully and to prevent them from making silly mistakes, make them work to process the question: make the font hard to read, the cadence awkward, and the wording unfamiliar.

Some researchers are also starting to look at the question of how to change people’s responses to cognitive fluency. Winkielman is part of a team of researchers who, in a forthcoming study, looked at the relationship between mood and the desire for fluency. They found that happy people are less interested in familiar, fluent stimuli – in this case abstract visual patterns – than sad people. According to Winkielman, this makes sense: When we’re unhappy, we seek out stability and a sense of safety; when we’re happy, we’re more open to the unfamiliar.

“Fluent things are familiar, but also boring and comfortable,” he says. “Disfluency is intriguing and novel. Sometimes you like comfort food, like when you’re sick. And usually you want to try something new when you’re more comfortable.”

It may be possible to tactically use disfluency to improve our own everyday lives, as well. Schwarz has found that the ease or difficulty of thinking something can sometimes neutralize the actual content of the thoughts themselves. Along with Lawrence Sanna of the University of North Carolina, Schwarz has looked at fluency and self-confidence. The two found that, if the goal was to boost college students’ confidence before an exam, getting them to list a few reasons why they were going to succeed was more effective than getting them to list many reasons. Because it was harder, the students who were asked to think of more ways to succeed were actually less confident, even though they ended up with longer lists.

And Schwarz and Sanna found a converse effect when they asked students to think of reasons they would not do well: Students asked to come up with a longer list of reasons they would fail reported feeling more confident than those asked for a shorter list. Indeed, they reported feeling as confident as the students who had been asked to come up with the short list of ways to succeed – by the authors’ calculation, thinking of 12 ways to fail had the same effect as thinking of three ways to succeed.

In unpublished research, Schwarz has found a similar effect with marital happiness: Couples asked to come up with a short list of good qualities about each other reported higher levels of marital happiness than the other couples in the study – but so did those couples asked to come up with a long list of each other’s bad qualities.

“Having to come up with many good things about your spouse is terrible, because it becomes difficult and then you think she’s obviously not that wonderful,” Schwarz says. “Coming up with a few bad things about your spouse, that’s bad because it’s not that hard. Having to come up with a lot of bad things, since it’s hard, it means she’s not that bad at all. The difficulty that you have tells you that there are not many such things.”

Results like these suggest that feeling good about yourself may in part be a matter of having a hard time feeling bad, and that confidence and even success might be triggered by interventions that do nothing but make failure seem the more intimidating possibility. The human brain, for all its power, is suspicious of difficulty, but perhaps we can learn to use that.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas.

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Full article and photo: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/01/31/easy__true/