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The Path of Least Resistance Is Paved with False Affordances

October 31, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In considering how desire does or does not come easily to us, I’ve suggested we can categorize our lives as:

Things we have that we dislike
Things we have that we like
Things we don’t have that we want (desire)

Things can be tangible, of course (money, weight), but they are just as likely to be intangible (time, stress).

The category of things we have that we don’t like can really get under our skin. Things in this category make us feel bad. Since we tend to believe that it’s the amount of something we have that’s causing us to feel bad, we seek to address the feeling by getting more or less of whatever the thing is. For example:

More time
Less weight
More productivity
Less procrastination
More money
Less stress
More happiness
Less negative thinking

These and dozens more topics are widely addressed in books and workshops by various experts who offer tools and techniques to help us get the right amount of the thing we want more or less of.

I can’t speak to the soundness of any specific tools or techniques. But I can point out an elephant-sized problem in the room. No matter what we’re trying to get more or less of, what we’re really aiming for is to feel less bad. Feeling less bad might sound like a good or at least harmless objective to aim for, but that is far from the case, for two big reasons.

Psychological Tension

If we’re focused on getting more or less of what we have that we don’t like in order to feel less bad we are operating based on psychological tension. When it comes to relieving psychological tension it almost doesn’t matter what tool or technique we use, we are quite likely to make enough progress to get to the point where we do, in fact, feel less bad.

But given that wanting to feel less bad is what was motivating us, once we get there we no longer feel the push to keep taking the action that got us there. So we eventually end up back where we started with the erroneous impression (explanation) that the tool or technique doesn’t really work or stopped working or isn’t for us. In reality, it worked just fine to get us feeling less bad. At least temporarily.

The Path of Least Resistance

The other problem with aiming to feel less bad is that it sets us up to go for tools and techniques that appeal to us because they seem familiar or easy or understandable: variations of tools or techniques we’ve tried before or that don’t seem like much of a stretch. I call those false affordances because they appear to offer a means or method to create change, but in fact they are highly unlikely to have that effect.

If we want to feel less bad, we are not going to go for something that seems difficult, or tedious, or just “not us,” meaning not the kind of thing we find appealing to do or use because, hey, that will make us feel bad.

Changing the status quo is not easy or comfortable, however. Employing only the tools or techniques we find appealing results in choosing the path of least resistance, i.e. choosing the status quo.

In terms of behavior change, false affordances are the tools, techniques, methods, etc. that don’t challenge us but instead fit relatively seamlessly into what we’re already doing. They give us a false impression of proactively attempting to resolve a perceived problem. Instead of helping us change the status quo, false affordances actively help us maintain it.

A Non-Starter

Wanting to feel less bad is not an indicator of a desire to create positive, intentional, significant, and sustained change to begin with. And feeling less bad is actually fairly easy to achieve, although it is always temporary and rarely satisfying. But even worse, being driven by feeling less bad can decrease our ability to enjoy the things we have that we do like not to mention completely obliterate our ability to identify things we want.

To summarize: feeling less bad has absolutely nothing to do with juicy desired outcomes, aspirations, or creating transformational change. It doesn’t even have anything to do with feeling good. As a motivator, it’s strictly a dead-end path.

Fourth post in a series on affordances. The previous posts can be found here(1), here(2), and here(3).

Stairs to Nowhere:
False, Hidden, and Perceptible Affordances

September 8, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Stairs are an example of an affordance. They provide “an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.” The action possibility they provide is the ascent or descent of an incline in order to gain access to another floor or level: moving between the sidewalk and a porch, between the first floor and the second floor, between the ground floor and a basement, or in some airports, between the tarmac and a plane.

Stairs to nowhere, however—of which there are more head-scratching examples than you might imagine—suggest an action possibility, but they do not allow access to anything. That makes them a “false” affordance.

As William Graver, who came up with the concept, put it:

A false affordance is an apparent affordance that does not have any real function, meaning that the [agent] perceives nonexistent possibilities for action.

While in many cases you could climb a staircase to nowhere, you would not actually get anywhere by doing so.

In addition to false affordances, Graver also identified what he called “hidden” affordances:

A hidden affordance indicates that there are possibilities for action, but these are not perceived by the [agent].

Graver appears to be talking about alternative uses you are not aware of for objects in the environment. Recently I used pliers to extend my reach so I could lift a chain link over a hook in the ceiling. My first thought was to use a bamboo stick like the ones I stake plants with, but they’re out in the garage. The pliers are in the kitchen. That isn’t really among the tool’s intended uses, but I use pliers for a lot of things so it wasn’t much of a stretch. There may have been other objects I could have used, but any other possibilities for action stayed hidden. If I hadn’t thought of the pliers, that possibility for action would have been hidden, too. Instead, the pliers in this case actually became a “perceptible” affordance.

Perceptible refers to the actions you think an object affords, whether or not those actions were intended and whether or not they are, in fact, available. In A Tale of Two Kitties, I described my cats’ apparent perception that bookcases afford an opportunity for climbing, while my perception is that they are a place to store books, which is what I use them for. (A sturdy staircase to nowhere could afford you the possibility for cardiovascular exercise if you were so inclined and perceived it as such.)

Affordances can—and have been—more extensively categorized. “Real” affordances are another distinction that is sometimes made. But given that affordances are relationships rather than properties of objects in the environment, the categories of false, hidden, and perceptible are sufficient for our discussion.

Creating Transformational Change

If you want to create significant, sustained change—which requires ongoing and repetitive action—you will have a greater chance of success if you find effective affordances to assist you.

As I said in the last post on affordances, everything everywhere is in motion all the time, everything is a process, and everything is an interpretation. You are a process that’s already in progress, on a trajectory with a great deal of momentum behind it. The only way to create change is by modifying your trajectory. And the only way to modify your trajectory is by modifying your mental model, which consists primarily of your beliefs and your operating system. How do you make those modifications? Essentially, how do you change your brain? You change it via the ongoing and repetitive actions you take. That’s neuroplasticity in a nutshell.

The impetus for change is your dissatisfaction with the status quo: an outcome you’re getting that is not the outcome you want. Your desire for change is to a very great extent determined by the level or extent of your dissatisfaction with the outcome in question. Low or moderate dissatisfaction will not motivate you to make significant, sustained change.

What is the most likely source of the outcome you’re getting that you don’t want (or an outcome you want that you’re not getting)?

If you’re like most people, you probably fail to identify the source correctly, which then leads you to look for solutions in all the wrong places. You may believe that if you are not getting the outcomes you want, something is wrong or broken. So you attempt to figure out what is wrong and fix that.

But Nothing Is Wrong

That’s right: nothing is wrong. The source of most problems you’re attempting to solve can be found in your operating system, which is to say that your operating system is working just fine to get you precisely the outcomes you’re getting.

If you want to get a different outcome, you need to determine and undertake a course of action that differs from the autopilot actions you have been taking.

You will most likely gravitate toward actions (solutions) that appeal to your operating system/mental model, but that will only serve to maintain the status quo. It’s a variation on the theme of doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. You may experience some temporary relief of psychological tension just because you’re doing something, but that will almost invariably be followed by a return to the previous behavior once the tension is relieved.

Whatever action you do identify to change your current trajectory and get a different outcome, it won’t be as appealing as the actions you normally take. In fact, it will probably feel contrived, which is why I call such actions—or sets of actions—contrivances.

Contrivances fall into the category of hidden affordances. They afford you the opportunity to modify your mental model and your trajectory and get the outcomes you want. But before they can do that for you, you have to perceive them as such—like I did with the pliers—so they become perceptible.

Third post in a series on affordances. Still to come: the allure of false affordances and our resistance to contrivances.

A Tale of Two Kitties

July 30, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Consider the concept of affordance: what exactly is an affordance and why should you care? I think I could write an article on all the different definitions of affordance. In fact, I would be surprised if someone hasn’t already done that. So instead of first defining the word, let’s begin with my cats.

When I adopted Naima (pictured above) in November 2010, she was three months old, and the apartment complex where I live did not require cats to be either leashed or kept inside. My previous cat, Tashi, a California transplant, had decided early in life that she was an indoor/outdoor cat. Her petite size was misleading. Back in California, she acquired a series of formidable panther boyfriends and regularly hung out with the small herd of deer on the hill below.

For one unforgettable 30-day period in 2008 I had to keep her indoors while she recovered from a near-death experience. I barely survived the ordeal. She wouldn’t stop yowling to get out. She even attempted to excavate a tunnel underneath the closed cat door.

I was determined that Naima would be strictly an indoor cat. Given that she was also an only cat—and I was her only person—I endeavored to make the environment cat-friendly and appealing while maintaining certain boundaries.

Preparations for her arrival included the purchase of cat basics: carrier, litter/litter box, food/food bowls, lots of toys, and a bed. They also included a 72” tall cat tree for the living room with a perch on top, a shorter but wider cat tree for my bedroom, and a few smaller scratching posts.

Cats and kittens of all sizes, including tigers and lions, like to climb. Tashi climbed trees in the yard and, when inside, the eight-foot-tall bookcase. Naima began using the cat trees right away, although they didn’t immediately stop her from climbing or trying to climb other pieces of furniture. She eventually got the message, but my dresser still bears the scratches from her tiny sharp claws.

Cats also like to play with their prey. Sadly, the only toy I could ever get Tashi interested in were those bouncy foam balls that look like miniature soccer balls. She could play fetch better than some dogs. She preferred to toy with birds and mice outdoors, bringing one in occasionally (either dead or alive: quite exciting for everyone involved). To be fair, she sometimes took one of her balls outside to play with. Also, she tended to munch on them. Naima, on the other hand, loved her toys, especially the roller-ball track and a certain brand of catnip mice. She would hide and then hunt the mice. She also loved to chase the bouncy soccer balls.

A Chair Affords You an Opportunity for Sitting

A bookcase offers me a place to keep my books, of which I have a few, as well as some photos or keepsakes. For my cats, the bookcase offered something to climb in order to see what’s there and get a better vantage point. Maybe find a good spot for a nap.

For Tashi (on the right, looking very focused), trees offered something to climb, as well as a hiding place, a lookout, and a possible source of food. There were no actual trees in Naima’s environment. But the manufactured cat trees offered her everything but a food source.

Another word for “offer” is “afford.” Bookcases, real trees, and cat trees are all affordances. When it comes to climbing, both indoor and outdoor cats have access to a number of affordances in addition to those just mentioned: cabinets and counter tops, refrigerators and other appliances, curtains, walls, fences, screens—they excel at figuring out how to get wherever you don’t want them to be. I once watched live video of a kitten whose eyes hadn’t yet opened successfully climb a wire enclosure meant to keep her safely contained in order to get to her mom on the other side.

The concept of affordance was developed by a psychologist, James J. Gibson, in the 1960s and 70s. Gibson was a proponent of the theory of direct, as opposed to indirect, perception, which is just a non-starter for me. Direct perception is an unscientific idea for which there is no supporting evidence. At this point, we know too much about how the brain works to take this idea seriously. (Meaning doesn’t reside “out there” in the environment or in objects in the environment. The brain has to supply meaning by interpreting the sensory data it receives and processes based on our mental model of the world.)

Nevertheless, I’ve been attracted to the possibilities of this concept, so I’m trying to determine whether or not there is something useful in it within the context of behavior change. One task has been to sift out the direct perception nonsense and see what remains. Another task is to wade through some painful verbiage related to so-called “ecological psychology,” which was also the brainchild of James Gibson.

If I sound dismissive, it’s because I’m frustrated. Affordance is used in many different areas (several branches of psychology, design, communications, AI, etc.) and lots of people have added their own spin to it. That makes it difficult to pin down. Maybe that’s OK, though. This fluidity may be the nature of the beast—better viewed as dynamic rather than static. And, well, I seem to be veering toward doing the same thing: defining—or redefining—affordance as it applies to behavior and behavior change.

My current working definition:

An affordance is an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.

As a definition it seems straightforward, if quite dry. But it just scratches the surface. There are different types of affordances, and understanding those differences is key to applying the concept to behavior change. The possibilities are intriguing and anything but dry. In fact, they’re potentially very juicy. More to come!

What [Else] Is It Telling Me?

March 25, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In 2018, Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their “discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.”

As a scientist, Allison has pointed out that you can’t really prove anything with science. All you can do is disprove. He says that the data from an experiment may be consistent with your hypothesis, but it might be consistent with another hypothesis, too. So you need to ask, what else is it telling me?

Allison covered similar ground in an interview he gave after winning the Nobel Prize:

[Being a good scientist] takes discipline but [also] creativity, you have got to learn how to view your data as a crystal or something, you know when you look at every facet of it, get to know it from every direction. Look at what it tells you beyond the reason you did the experiment and figure it out. And so I think that’s pretty much it; it is the ability to really study the data and really learn what it is telling you.

As an aside on creativity, Allison is also a musician. He plays harmonica in a band composed of other scientists. This isn’t unusual. It turns out that Nobel Prize laureates are three times more likely than other scientists to have a creative hobby (performing, singing, acting, glassblowing, writing, painting, etc.). You could say they themselves have multiple facets. Knowing that people are Nobel Prize winning scientists doesn’t tell you everything about them.

WYSIATI

I included Allison’s comments at the end of an article on Daniel Kahneman’s concept of WYSIATI or What You See Is All There Is. (Kahneman is another Nobel Prize winner, but I don’t know anything about his hobbies.)

WYSIATI means that when you’re determining the meaning of something or constructing a story about it (i.e. interpreting it), your brain can only use the information available to it at the time. What it sees is all there is. The less information you have, the easier it is for your brain to construct a convincing story. You don’t cast about looking for information you don’t currently possess. What am I likely to be missing? How am I misconstruing this? What else is this information telling me?

Similarly, if the data from an experiment is consistent with your hypothesis, why go looking for trouble by asking if it could be consistent with another hypothesis, too.

The unconscious part of your brain is looking for a good enough answer right now that adequately fits your model of the world. Accuracy is not its highest priority. You need to get a move on. No straggling allowed.

We think we have a clear idea of what’s happening. We think we understand why things happen or happen the way they do. And we feel pretty certain about our assessment of events and situations.

But certainty, like confidence, is a feeling and has nothing to do with the accuracy or lack thereof of our interpretations and beliefs. The more we proceed through life assuming we are correct, the more likely we are to be wrong and the more difficult it becomes to change—our perspectives, our behavior, the trajectory of our lives.

Look at All Facets of an Experience

One way out of this predicament is to ask a lot more questions—not just random questions: hard questions. As a species, we have a unique capacity for self-awareness, but we’re not particularly good at accessing it. As a result:

trying to disentangle our interpretations of events from the events themselves is hard
trying to identify the unconscious beliefs that could underlie our interpretations is even harder
attempting to separate fact from fiction in perceiving events or situations in order to come up with alternative interpretations is extremely hard for some

But if we want different outcomes, if we want to get off the rock we’re on and get on a rock that offers a different perspective, or if we want to think different thoughts, we need to ask the hard questions. We need to be able to explore the facets or components of our experiences and recognize the roles played by our interpretations and our beliefs.

Here’s an exercise to try. But first, some definitions:

An event is something that happens (the data, if you will).
Your interpretation is the meaning you make of the thing that happens.
Beliefs are convictions you have about the nature of reality (the way the world works).

Part One

Describe an event.
Describe your interpretation of the event.
Ask yourself, what is this interpretation telling me about my perception of the way the world works?
Identify one or more beliefs that could underlie your interpretation.

Part Two

Take another look at the event (the data) and ask yourself, what else is it telling me?
Describe two possible alternative interpretations based on the data (facts) of the event.

Part Three

Identify your emotional response to your interpretation of the event and ask yourself, what is it telling me?
Identify the action you took in response to your interpretation of the event and ask yourself, what is it telling me?
Identify your emotional response to the action you took and ask yourself, what is it telling me?

Keep asking yourself what is it telling me? And then what else is it telling me? We can’t access our beliefs directly because they are part of the mental model our brain maintains of what things mean and what is normal for us. But the beliefs that make up our mental model affect our perceptions and interpretations of everything we experience.

We can’t create significant, sustained change unless we change our mental model. In order to do that, we have to learn more about it. We have to be curious. We have to ask the hard questions.

Part two of two parts. Part one is here.

Decoding Emotions

January 3, 2022 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

There are two distinct perspectives on the nature of emotions. One view is that they are universal—and universally recognizable—responses that are automatically triggered by events and circumstances. The other view is that they are constructed by each of us moment-to-moment, based on our particular combination of physiology, temperament, and experience.

Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, wasn’t the first book to attempt to codify facial expressions, but it still serves as inspiration for what has been referred to by Lisa Feldman Barrett as the classical view of emotion.

[H]e claimed that emotions and their expressions were an ancient part of universal human nature. All people, everywhere in the world are said to exhibit and recognize facial expressions of emotions without any training whatsoever.

This idea was further advanced in the 1960s and 70s, by psychologist Paul Ekman and others, and remains a widely held view. It’s why many people believe there are six basic emotions—fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, and surprise—that are recognized by people across the globe. And it’s why the use of psychological tests for recognizing emotions from facial photographs is still quite common.

Furthermore the ability to identify emotions from facial expressions is a standard test of empathy, with implications in diagnosing various mental health conditions. So it’s relatively safe to say that a belief in empathy is based in the classical view of emotions.

But as Feldman Barrett points out:

Hundreds of experiments have shown that people worldwide can match emotion words to so-called expressions of emotion, posed by actors who aren’t actually feeling those emotions. However, those expressions can’t be consistently and specifically detected by objective measures of facial muscle movements when people are actually feeling emotion.

So if most (if not all) of the people who have been photographed for emotion detection tests are…emoting (i.e., acting), what do these tests actually reveal? At best, they appear to reveal some consensus agreement as to what those facial expressions are supposed to represent—stereotypes of emotions, if you will.

A Little Context, Please

Even if the photographs were not posed, focusing exclusively on faces excludes all the relevant contextual detail that the brain uses to form impressions and make interpretations.

Other things, including body movement, personality, tone of voice and changes in skin tone have important roles in how we perceive and display emotion. —Douglas Heaven, Nature, 2/26/20

Surrounding environmental context is even more critical. In a PNAS paper published on 3/21/19, Aleix Martinez offers the following images to support the importance of contextual information.

When asked to identify the emotions shown in these images, most people agree that the left image expresses sadness, while the right image is a clear display of anger. If asked whether these expressions communicate positive or negative valence, most people agree that both correspond to a negative expression. The problem with these assessments is that context is not observable, which may lead to incorrect interpretations. Images courtesy of (Left) Imgflip and (Right) Getty Images/Michael Steele.

Adding context to the facial expressions previously seen in [the previous figure] radically changes our interpretation of the emotion being experienced by a person. (A and B) In these two images, most observers agree that the people shown are experiencing a joyful event (i.e., positive valence). (C and D) When the face and body are blurred out, inference of valence and arousal is still possible. Images courtesy of (Upper Left, Lower Left, and Lower Right) Imgflip and (Upper Right) Getty Images/Michael Steele.

Martinez concludes that:

[w]e still do not know which brain regions of interest (ROIs) are involved in the recognition of affective context and how these communicate with already known areas. ROIs for the recognition of facial muscle articulations and biological motion as well as affective variables have been identified. It is logical to assume that ROIs involved in visual analysis of scenes, objects, and bodies are part of the visual interpretation of context. But does the brain employ other mechanisms to perform this inference? And, how do all these ROIs interact with one another to create the conscious affective percept we all experience?

How Many Words Is a Picture Worth?

Contextual information can not only lead to more accurate interpretations, it can also turn the tables on emotion recognition altogether. In writing about rethinking emotional intelligence a few years ago, I included this excerpt from The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall:

In the early twentieth century, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov produced a film of unnarrated images: a corpse in a coffin, a lovely young woman, and a bowl of soup. In between these images, Kuleshov squeezed shots of an actor’s face. The audience noted that when the soup was shown, the actor emoted hunger. When the corpse was shown, he looked sad. When the lovely young woman appeared, the actor’s face was transformed by lust.

In fact the actor wasn’t emoting at all. After every shot, Kuleshov had inserted exactly the same footage of an actor staring impassively into the camera.

We often see what we expect to see rather than what’s actually there. Expectations play an enormous role in the interpretations made by the brain. So does our experience, as well as the language we speak and the range of our emotional vocabulary.

This applies to the interpretation of our own emotions as well as the emotions of others. When it comes to interpreting our own emotions, we don’t usually go about it by looking at ourselves in a mirror. We’re more likely to focus on internal cues first. But no matter how strong those cues are, they do require interpretation. For example, excitement and anxiety are what are called high-arousal states that have similar neurological and physiological symptoms, such as increased heart-rate, restlessness, rapid breathing, difficulty concentrating, and nervousness or tension. So context (the circumstances surrounding a particular high-arousal state) plays a role in our process of interpretation. Nevertheless, some of us are more inclined in general to interpret this set of sensations as anxiety and some of us are more inclined to interpret it as excitement.

Our personal interpretive tendencies are very likely to influence our interpretations of the emotions others are experiencing. Given what we understand about how the brain works, it’s hard to imagine how they wouldn’t.

Take Away

The idea that emotions are constitutive (constructed) has gained more and more ground as neuroscience research expands our understanding of how we function. There are so many things we take for granted, or at face value, without questioning them. The idea that there are six basic emotions that are universally recognized is an intuitive get. But there was actually substantial disagreement with the classical view of emotion prior to the 1960s; it just got swept under the rug. It wasn’t the first scientific concept that got swept aside and won’t be the last.

Emotions are real just as a sense of self is real, but neither an emotion nor a sense of self is a thing. Instead both are processes, continually in flux, a result of our interpretation—and open to our interpretation.