Are there times when it is better to simply give up? Psychologists have been exploring this question, and more specifically a possible link between tenacity and both physical and mental health.
It would seem that persistence would be tonic over the long haul; hanging tough should increase the odds that you'll succeed, and personal success is closely linked to well-being. But what if the goal is extremely unlikely? When does an admirable trait like perseverance start to look more like beating your head against the wall?
To test this in the laboratory, psychologists Gregory Miller and Carsten Wrosch developed a psychological instrument that can reliably distinguish between people who when faced with a difficult goal either persist or let go of it. In a series of experiments, the psychologists exhaustively studied these two personality types to see how healthy and well adjusted they are.
In their most recent study, published in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the psychologists followed teenagers for a full year. Over that time, individuals who did not persist to reach difficult goals had much lower levels of a protein called CRP, an indicator of bodily inflammation. Inflammation has recently been linked to several serious diseases, including diabetes and heart disease, suggesting that healthy but overly tenacious teens may already be on the road toward chronic illness later in life.
Accordingly, Miller and Wrosch suggest it may be more prudent to cut one's losses in the face of an insurmountable obstacle. “When people are faced with situations in which they cannot realize a key life goal, the most adaptive response for physical and mental health may be to disengage from this goal,” write the authors.
But all is not lost for go-getters. The psychologists also sorted both groups by their willingness to re-engage and set new goals after they gave up on something important. While they did not find a direct link between re-engagement and physical health, they did find that people who readily jumped back into life had a greater sense of purpose and mastery and were less likely to ruminate about the past. Setting these new goals appears to buffer the emotional consequences of failure, especially for those who have the hardest time letting go.
You won't believe what's driving the economy
Do humans act largely rationally, or can stories and rumors throw an entire economy off course? Lately, economists are increasingly recognizing that narratives matter.
In the early 1920s, the US suffered a brutally sharp economic contraction, in which inflation turned rapidly to deflation and stock price-to- earnings ratios dropped to 50-year lows. The economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, in their book “Monetary History of the United States,” blamed an inexperienced Federal Reserve, which had abruptly increased its discount rate by 1 percentage point.
In a recent speech, Yale University economist Robert Shiller offered a different explanation. Rumors were circulating that the Communist revolution in Russia would soon spread to America, and newspapers were warning that the profiteering associated with World War I would soon give way to a decline in prices. It's thus plausible, Shiller argues, that these and other narratives spread economic uncertainty, discouraging consumer spending and business investment.
Shiller makes similar arguments about the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crisis. In the 2000s, stories about people getting rich by flipping houses contributed to a belief that house prices would always go up. The financial industry played a huge role by catalyzing the epidemic of opinion and exploiting it for its own ends. But bankers couldn‘t have created the bubble without the help of mortgage borrowers who bought into the narrative.
Shiller has long been one of the few economists to take the role of the “animal spirits” that drive mass opinion seriously. What's different in his new work ― on what he calls “narrative economics” ― is the idea that stories move more or less like infectious agents, with some being much more contagious than others, and that an epidemiological approach might help us better understand their movements. The data needed to do so are starting to become available ― for example, from textual analyses of news feeds and social media.
Shiller's work illustrates a more abstract argument recently made by sociologist Jens Beckert of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. If economists typically assume that rational expectations drive human behavior, Beckert argues that people operate on “fictitious expectations” ― informed guesses about the future founded in part on prevailing narratives and the beliefs of others.
People are neither rational nor irrational, but somewhere in between. They learn what they can from the social world around them, even if they're sometimes drawn into error as a result. This idea of “social learning” is commonly studied in biology, yet has been largely neglected in economics.
Former Wall Street analyst Robert Prechter has published a number of insightful books arguing that moods, including unconscious ones, drive financial markets, rather than vice versa. It's a perspective that turns our common thinking about causality back to front, and takes some getting used to, but it's catching on.
It is perhaps appropriate that the power of stories is gaining greater recognition during the age of Donald Trump, who rose to the presidency thanks in large part to an utter disregard for objective reality. As Shiller acknowledges, Trump is a “master of narrative.” Let's hope this one doesn't prove to be disastrous.