The Oxford English Dictionary lists several definitions for ‘sloth’.1 This is one:
An edentate arboreal mammal of a sluggish nature, inhabiting tropical parts of Central and South America.
This is another:
As a ‘proper term’, by later writers taken to mean: a company of bears (or erroneously, boars).
These aren’t sins, of course, unless your god happens to be offended by grossly out-of-proportion, tree-dwelling mammals and/or the improper use of collective nouns.
It’s actually OED definition 1a that we want:
But this isn’t really a sin either. It reads more like a Sunday afternoon. Or a Saturday for that matter. Or even the occasional workday.
So just why is sloth a sin? Well – and here we can spread the blame around a bit – it’s due partly to the midday laziness of Middle Ages monks and partly to the semantic sloppiness of the church, but mostly to the Protestants.
Originally, it wasn’t ‘sloth’ that was on the list of deadly sins, but ‘acedia’, which is Latin for a kind of spiritual laziness, malaise, or despair, a rather more sinister disposition than the OED’s benign ‘disinclination to action’. It’s unclear to me precisely what a lazy spirit is, but it was something that Middle Ages monastics were apparently a little uneasy about. Presumably, despairing spirits resided in slack, sluggish bodies, the hands of which were destined for all manner of devil’s work. Evagrius Ponticus, the monk who first listed the deadly vices, writes that sloth would compel the monk to ‘look constantly towards the windows, to jump out of the cell, to watch the sun to see how far it is from the ninth hour, to look this way and that’.2
All this jumping about sounds rather un-slothlike to me, but the point is that monks were expected to contribute to the physical and spiritual well-being of their communities, and any spiritual malaise that had them looking this way and that and jumping out of their cells would likely undermine such commitment. Religious leaders didn’t want their followers walking off into the godless desert after the midday meal, abandoning faith and fellow monks. So they institutionalized acedia as a mortal sin.
That was then. Over time the church itself seems to have got a little lazy with the semantics of sloth. The insidious ‘acedia’ was replaced with the innocuous ‘sloth’, and as a result, we have a contemporary injunction against the rather benign state of ‘taking it easy’.
Now, only part of sloth’s current bad reputation is the direct legacy of its deadly status. As I mentioned, this is mostly the fault of the Protestants. With the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century came the equating of work with salvation, an equation that the great German sociologist Max Weber dubbed the ‘Protestant work ethic’.3
With this notion of work as redemption comes the idea of sloth as an economic sin. Any taking it easy that occurs is less likely to be seen as an offence against God than as an offence against the economy. It is not the health of the sinner’s soul that contemporary anti-sloth moralists worry about, but the health of the bottom line. The midday malaise of the modern sloth manifests only rarely as a soul-searching sojourn into the desert. Instead we have Facebook-poking, Twitter-tweeting and MySpace whatever-ing, all of which might be bad for business, but hardly bad for the spirit.
Work undoubtedly provides meaning and means for us all, but the blind adoration of the Protestant work ethic is troubling. Bertrand Russell, for one, wasn’t happy about it: ‘The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy’, he writes in In Praise of Idleness.4 The problem with the work = virtue belief is the invalid corollary: sloth = vice. For when one pits virtuous work against sinful sloth, the sin becomes synonymous with inactivity, with doing nothing.
But this opposition misses a crucial point. In truth, sloth actually constitutes a lot of activity, it’s just that much of this activity is unseen unless looked for. Robert Louis Stevenson captures it in his An Apology for Idlers: ‘Idleness so called . . . does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized.’5 The goal of this chapter is to convince you of this. And we see Stevenson’s point no more clearly than in that ultimate of slothful states: sleep.
Sleep on it
For all its seeming simplicity, sleep remains something of a mystery to scientists. From the outside it looks about as complicated as a brick: eyes closed, the occasional murmur, maybe a toss here and a turn there. This general lack of apparent function might give the impression that the brain shuts down during sleep, so that it, like us, can get some rest. But this is not the case. The sleeping brain is the ultimate Stevensonian – it does a hell of a lot that is not recognized by the casual observer.
Scientists have known about the consequences of sleep, and lack of it, for quite some time. Sleep debt has been related to increased risk of heart disease, susceptibility to the common cold, and risk of diabetes.6 Most of the really interesting research on the benefits of sleep, however, comes not from the medical domain, but from the psychological.
Robert Stickgold of the Harvard Medical School has spent a considerable part of his career researching sleep. One of the key insights from the past few decades of his research is that the brain does a lot of work shaping our memories while we’re asleep. The sleeping brain works hard to consolidate the information we have been processing during the day. According to Stickgold, sleep sews together the fabric of our memories, strengthening associations and forging new connections.7 And it does so in a rather creative and useful way.
Consider the following list of words and try to remember them.
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Nurse |
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Physician |
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Sick |
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Ill |
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Medicine |
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Patient |
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Health |
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Office |
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Hospital |
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Stethoscope |
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Dentist |
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|
Now turn the page and answer the questions that follow.
Was ‘sick’ on the list? What about ‘doctor’? How about ‘nurse’?
Answers: yes, no and yes. Interestingly, when people do this task they are quite likely to mistakenly ‘remember’ that the word ‘doctor’ was on the list.8 (Look back, it isn’t.)
This little demonstration highlights an important property of human memory. What happens in this task is that the brain encodes the gist of the word list and tends to forget the details. From words like ‘ill’, ‘stethoscope’, and ‘hospital’, the brain picks up the obvious medical theme, and then when tested, it uses this theme to make an informed judgment about what was likely to have been on the list.9
Our brain is quite good at gist-processing when we’re awake. But it turns out that it may be even better at it when we’re asleep. With Jessica Payne of Harvard and numerous other colleagues, Stickgold gave participants a task like the preceding one at 9 p.m. one evening and then tested them at 9 a.m. the following morning, after a night’s sleep. Other participants were presented with word lists at 9 a.m. and then tested in the evening, after twelve hours of being awake. What Stickgold and Payne found was that gist processing was significantly more pronounced after sleep than after the same amount of time spent awake. Sleepers were more likely to recall the word ‘doctor’, even though it wasn’t on the list.
Although this result suggests that sleep leads to worse memory performance – ‘recalling’ words that weren’t there – this apparent maladaptiveness is actually quite useful for everyday functioning. We are bombarded with so much detailed, often redundant information during the course of our lives that we seldom need to remember all the ins and outs. Extracting the summary meaning or gist from a set of stimuli is often much more efficient than laboriously retaining and processing all the details.
Other forms of memory are also well served by sleep. Emotional memories and other types of declarative memory (i.e. memory for facts and events, or ‘what’ memories) are also solidified by a good night’s sleep.10 And procedural memory, too – the term we use to describe our memories of how to do things – also gets a boost.11
But it’s not just memory that gets a kick start from sleeping. One of the real benefits of the sleeping brain’s creative needlework is seen in a study by Ullrich Wagner of the University of Lubeck.12
Wagner gave participants a series of puzzles, consisting of patterns of three digits. For example:
Participants had to produce a second line of digits by using the following two rules:
1. If two consecutive digits are the same, respond with that digit.
2. If two consecutive digits are different, respond with the third digit.
Beginning on the left, the first two digits are 1 and 1, so – applying rule 1 – the response is 1, and a 1 is written in the first space on the second line. This response, 1, and the next number, 4, are different, so applying rule 2, the next response is the other digit, 9. And so on.
Below is the completed sequence.
This kind of problem might seem tedious (and it is), but there’s a shortcut. And if you can see the shortcut, you can solve the problem much more quickly. Can you see it? (Hint: look for a pattern in the second line of numbers.)
What you may have noticed is that there is a mirror image in the second to seventh digits in the second line (the last three digits – 4, 1, 9 – are a mirror of the second to fifth digits – 9, 1, 4). If you notice this pattern, then you can complete such puzzles without using the rules.
This is another insight problem for which the solution simply pops into consciousness in an ‘aha’ or ‘light-bulb’ moment.
Wagner gave participants in his study some practice with these sorts of puzzles and then tested them on similar puzzles eight hours later. Some were trained in the morning and came back to be tested in the evening; others were trained in the evening and came back the next morning after having slept through the night. So what does sleep do to insight?
Of those who stayed awake between training and testing, 23 per cent discovered the shortcut. This percentage more than doubled for those who slept: 59 per cent of the sleepers managed to see the trick in the puzzle.
Why does this happen? Again, it’s because of the way the sleeping brain processes and structures information. Not only do our dozing brains synthesize memories to extract the gist, they also restructure our memories and mental associations into interesting and novel patterns. And it is this creative re-weaving of our associative networks that leads to that ‘aha’ moment.
Now, it would be annoying if we required a full eight hours every time we wanted a little insight. Thankfully, the benefits of sleep aren’t restricted to our night-long somnambulatory efforts. Naps work, too.
The UC San Diego psychologist Sara Mednick is a nap expert. And in research done with Denise Cai and other colleagues, she tested the influence of naps on creative problem solving.13
In one of her studies, Mednick gave participants a Remote Associates Test (RAT). This is a kind of word-association exercise that requires you to think of a word that ties together a group of three other words. Here’s an example:
cracker, union, rabbit
Can you think of a word that links these three? (The answer: jack.)
Along with the RAT, Mednick gave participants a series of analogy puzzles involving questions like these:
Chips are to salty as candy is to ____________.
The answer: ‘sweet’.
Mednick gave participants these puzzles at 9 a.m. and then had them return to the lab at 1 p.m. When they returned, she had some people take a ninety-minute nap and asked others to simply rest quietly in a chair and listen to music. Then, later in the day, Mednick had participants come back to the lab and do another RAT.
What she found was that nappers who had experienced REM sleep (rapid eye movement sleep, the stage that often involves vividly recalled dreams) solved about 40 per cent more RAT puzzles in the second session that they did before their nap. Non-nappers showed no such improvement. And, importantly, nappers who did not experience REM sleep during their nap showed no performance enhancement either.
There’s a further twist here. An important point to note is that some of the RAT puzzles that participants were tested on later in the day had the same solutions as the analogy puzzles that participants completed in the 9 a.m. session. For example, the answer to the RAT problem ‘cookies, sixteen, heart’ is ‘sweet’, which matches the solution to the analogy puzzle noted above. And it’s only for these RAT problems, those whose solutions were also solutions to the morning’s analogy puzzles, that REM sleep conferred an advantage. When participants were tested on the same RATs as they were trained on or on completely novel RATs, sleep did nothing to performance.
What this suggests is that REM sleep is not simply improving memory in general, but more specifically influencing the way that previously encountered information (e.g. answers to the analogy puzzles) is integrated into the mind’s associative networks. What the REM brain does is spread activation out across our associative networks from the concepts and ideas that we have encountered during the day. We are primed with the word ‘sweet’ in an analogy puzzle, for example, and then when we sleep, the brain sends out ripples of activation to associated concepts, such as ‘heart’, ‘sixteen’ and ‘cookie’. Then, when we are later given the RAT problem ‘heart, sixteen, cookie’, we can more easily come up with the answer because our REM brains have already strengthened the appropriate connections to ‘sweet’.
Of all sleep-related phenomena, dreams have perhaps the most resounding resonance with everyday life. We don’t directly experience gist memory forming nor do we feel activation rippling out across our minds’ networks, but we do experience and remember our dreams.
So what are dreams exactly? And what are they for? These are tricky questions, but recent work suggests that dreams may be an experiential window into what the brain is doing while we’re asleep.14 I said that we don’t have direct experience of memory formation and spreading activation. That’s true. But we might have second-hand experience. Dreams may actually provide a consciously accessible reflection of the brain processes occurring during sleep.
Erin Wamsley of the Harvard Medical School and her colleagues were interested in the effects of sleep on basic maze-navigation abilities.15 So she brought participants into her lab and trained them on a virtual, 3D navigation task. After training, half the participants were allowed to nap for ninety minutes, while the other half were kept awake but in a resting state. Later in the day, all participants were tested on the same maze to see how quickly they could navigate it.
Again we see the benefits of napping: those who napped got through the maze faster than those who stayed awake.
But that’s not the interesting part. Wamsley also woke people during their naps and asked them what they were dreaming about. Most reported not dreaming about the maze, but those who did showed a tenfold improvement over those who didn’t.
Now, it’s unlikely that dreams somehow cause task improvements. It’s more likely that they reflect the brain processes that lead to performance enhancement. Dreams play out, in images and other sensory phenomena, the processes of gist formation, procedural and declarative memory consolidation, and creative insight that the brain engages in during sleep.
There are still numerous mysteries about how the sleeping brain works, not the least of which concern dreaming. But even this preliminary survey should convince you that this most slothful of states does a lot for us, much of which is very useful.
Do you remember what the previous paragraph was about? It’s OK, I’m not offended. Chances are that your mind will wander for up to eight minutes for every hour that you spend reading this book. About 13 per cent of the time that people spend reading is spent not reading, but daydreaming or mind-wandering.16
But reading, by comparison to other things we do, isn’t so badly affected by daydreaming. Some estimates put the average amount of time spent daydreaming at 30 to 40 per cent.17
It’s fine to dream while you’re asleep; you can’t help it. But doing it while you’re awake seems to speak of some mental deficiency, a lack of discipline or character, or at the very least a lack of attentiveness. For anti-sloth moralists, defenders of disciplined productivity above all else, what mind-wandering amounts to is no less than a deadly sin.
And they have a point – but only up to a point. The wandering mind is by definition less engaged in the task at hand (reading this book, for example), and this disengagement can lead to poorer task-related performance (e.g. recalling the content of a previous paragraph). But when the mind wanders, it often meanders down avenues more interesting and more important than the one it’s currently on.
When we daydream, our attention becomes decoupled from the current environment and turns inwards to our feelings and thoughts. But the wandering mind doesn’t simply stroll down any old mental path; it heads towards thoughts and feelings that are of some significance to us: our future plans, our everyday problems, our memories. So while we’re reading War and Peace, or indeed this book, we may catch ourselves in a moment of reverie about a loved one or an upcoming exam or some important client at work.
Although dwelling on such issues may seem a rather obsessive, ruminative tendency, our minds’ constant preoccupation with the things that are important to us may in fact be helpful.
In one study, psychologists Deborah Greenwald of Northeastern University and David Harder of Tufts found that the content of people’s daydreams reflected the kinds of coping strategies that they typically employed to solve problems.18 This suggests that the wandering mind might actually be off searching for ways to cope with the stresses of everyday life. You may not know exactly how to deal with your man troubles, but your wandering mind is working on it.
Daily troubles aren’t the only problems that mind-wandering might help us solve. Allowing the mind to amble in slothful bliss may actually improve performance on other kinds of tasks as well.
One of the most interesting things about this slothful pastime is that it involves the same brain regions that are active when people are solving insight puzzles. These kinds of puzzles, remember, involve finding a solution that simply pops into one’s head. Although ‘aha’ moments might appear to come out of thin air, a distinctive pattern of neural activity precedes them. In the time leading up to the successful solution of an insight problem, there is increased activation in a variety of neural areas, including the posterior cingulate cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the middle and superior temporal gyri.19 The particulars of these brain regions don’t really matter for our purposes. The important point to note is that these areas, among others, are also activated during mind-wandering.
What’s even more interesting is that mind-wandering might actually be the brain’s natural state. When the mind wanders, parts of the brain that make up the so-called default network are activated. This net work is a complex of brain areas that are typically active when we are resting. (Again, the particulars don’t matter, but for those who are interested, the prominent default network areas include the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus region, and the temporoparietal junction.)20 This collection of brain regions is the default because it is active when the brain is not occupied with external processing demands. It’s thought to reflect the processing of internal information, thoughts and memories – those things that are continually important to us and are often the focuses of the wandering mind. This overlap between mind-wandering and the default state of the brain has led researchers to speculate that ‘mind-wandering constitutes a psychological baseline from which people depart when attention is required elsewhere and to which they return when tasks no longer require conscious supervision.’21
The wandering mind may be a creative genius, but it is an absent-minded genius. We may be off dreaming up creative solutions to our love troubles while reading War and Peace, but our memory for who’s related to whom in Tolstoy’s complex genealogical matrix will suffer. Sometimes we need to focus, even if the task at hand is dead boring. So here’s a remedy for the wandering mind.
Jackie Andrade of the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth in England asked perhaps not one of the most important scientific questions of the twenty-first century, but certainly one pertinent to our project here: can doodling possibly counteract mind-wandering’s drawbacks?22 The study design was straightforward:
1. Get people to listen to a boring audio recording that’s likely to induce mind-wandering: ‘Hi! Are you doing anything on Saturday? I’m having a birthday party and was hoping you could come. It’s not actually my birthday, it’s my sister Jane’s. She’ll be twenty-one . . . I’ve also invited her boyfriend William and one of her old school friends, Claire . . . I can’t believe it has got so cold already . . . Jenny from next door is going to bring a quiche and I’ll do some garlic bread . . .’ You get the picture.
2. Give half of the participants instructions to doodle during the task (give the other half no such instructions).
3. Spring a memory test on participants after the recording, asking for recall of names and places mentioned in the recording.
Now, we know that mind-wandering can hamper memory performance on such tests. Does doodling offer some protection against this? The results of Andrade’s study: doodlers recalled 29 per cent more information than non-doodlers did.
Precisely why doodling offers this protection is not quite clear, but for now here’s a free yet sage piece of advice: when you’re sitting through your next long, slow, mind-numbing Monday morning meeting (or while you’re reading the rest of this book), doodle.
Lazy heads
By some accounts, if you want to be an expert at anything, you need to devote about ten thousand hours to it. This is unwelcome news to the sloth. The ten-thousand-hour rule (which can be translated into the ten-year rule, calculated at about 2.7 hours per day) seems to apply to becoming a chess grand master, a world-class violinist, or a Beatle.23
This is clearly unacceptable. The sloth doesn’t want to spend ten thousand hours doing much of anything. But take heart. It’s not always a case of more is better. When it comes to making complex decisions, the lazy mind of the sloth, the mind that eschews the sweat-inducing effort of conscious thought, may actually be better off.
Psychologists have known for quite a while that a lot of our thinking happens without much effort at all. Experiments show that we can and do form impressions and make judgments after very little time. What’s more, these offhand, effortlessly formed impressions are often just as accurate as more arduously formed ones.
Take a study by Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady from Tufts University.24 They showed people a series of photographs of male faces. The key manipulation was the presentation time of the photos: some participants could view the photos at their own pace; others saw each photo for a rather lengthy 10 or 6.5 seconds; and yet others saw the photos for just 100, 50, or 33 milliseconds.
The participants’ task was to judge whether the man in each photo was gay or straight. The pictures had been selected from online personal ads, so the researchers knew the sexual orientation of the men photographed and thus had a standard against which to judge participants’ accuracy. The results showed that participants in all time conditions except 33 milliseconds (possibly because 33ms presentations may be outside of subjective awareness) categorized the photos above chance levels. Importantly, participants’ accuracy was just as good in the 50-millisecond condition as it was when they had 10 seconds to look at the photos. Having plenty of time to scrutinize and theorize brought no benefits.
Bringing no benefits is one thing. It also happens that the effortful, scrutinizing conscious mind can actually leave us worse off.
In one study by Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler, both at the University of Virginia at the time, participants were brought into the lab to do a taste test.25 When they arrived, they found before them five jams – and not just any jams. Wilson and Schooler had chosen them specifically to represent a range of quality. They chose the five strawberry jams that a group of experts had ranked 1st, 11th, 24th, 32nd and 44th on a long list based on sweetness and aroma and a bunch of other jam-relevant attributes.
Participants were asked to taste each jam and then rate their liking for each one. However, not everyone did this in the same way. Half of the participants were instructed to analyze why they felt the way they did about each jam before making their evaluations. These people engaged in conscious deliberation about the reasons why they liked or disliked each jam. After tasting the jams, they were given a questionnaire on which they listed their reasons. The other half of the participants were given a different questionnaire after the taste test, asking them to list reasons why they chose their university major. After completing these questionnaires, all participants then rated how much they liked each jam.
If effortful deliberation and the close analysis of reasons improves decision-making, we would expect there to be greater agreement between the participants who reasoned about the jams and the jam experts. Wilson and Schooler found exactly the opposite: the preferences of those participants who had thought about their college subjects lined up better with the experts’ opinions. Those who thought consciously about why they liked the jams ended up making ‘suboptimal’ preference ratings.
The reason for this difference is that the conscious mind is subject to decision biases that the lazy, unconscious, or distracted mind (the one thinking about college subjects) avoids. When we consciously deliberate about a choice, we tend to put undue weight on attributes that are accessible, plausible and easy to verbalize.26 And doing this can lead to preferences and decisions that are less than perfect. Just because we can verbalize a thought about, say, the packaging or price of a strawberry jam doesn’t mean that packaging or price are relevant factors in determining our preferences.
The real problem with conscious thought comes down to the fact that the conscious mind is limited in its capacity to process information. Our stream of consciousness is only so wide, a mere trickle in comparison to the surging river of the unconscious. According to unconscious-thought theory, proposed by Ap Dijksterhuis, professor of psychology at Radboud University in the Netherlands, during unconscious thought information is processed, organized and weighted in a more optimal fashion than during conscious thought.27
So what exactly is unconscious thought? The official definition: ‘object-relevant or task-relevant cognitive or affective thought processes that occur while conscious attention is directed elsewhere’.28 This is precisely what was happening for those participants in Wilson and Schooler’s study who were thinking about college majors. Although they knew they would later have to make preference ratings about the jams, their conscious minds were temporarily engaged in another task, allowing their unconscious minds to process jam-related information in a manner free from the biases of conscious thought.
There are, of course, limits to this theory. If the processing constraints of conscious thought can be overcome, then effortful, conscious thought and unconscious thought are about equally good in guiding decisions and choices.29 Nevertheless, there is mounting evidence that effort-free, slothful, unconscious thought can often lead to better judgments about almost anything, from jam to university courses, from artwork to apartments.30
Slothful saints
Jam and cars, paintings and apartments. The effects of unconscious thought on judgments about these things is interesting, but hardly worthy, you might argue, of raising slothful thinking to the status of virtue. Well, how about this: unconscious thought may actually make us more moral.
Jaap Ham, Kees van den Bos and Evert Van Doorn, all at Utrecht University at the time, presented people with information about four job application procedures.31 One description was of a fair procedure, one was of an unfair procedure, and the other two were of procedures of somewhat middling fairness.
After reading all the information, participants were asked to rank the procedures in order of most to least just. However, not all participants did so immediately. The key manipulation, as in most studies of unconscious thought, was what people did between reading and judging. Some were asked to give their justice judgments immediately, others were asked to consciously deliberate on the fairness of these procedures for about three minutes, and yet others were told that they’d be asked for justice judgments, but not yet – first, they’d be required to do another task. These participants, in the unconscious-thought condition, did a distracter task, the two-back task (in which they were presented with an ongoing stream of single-digit numbers on a computer screen and asked whether or not the current number matched the number presented two positions previous). They did this for three minutes and then made their justice judgments.
With judgments about morality, you might think that conscious thought should be a better guide than unconscious thought. We may waver on which jam, car, or painting we like, but surely we can apply moral rules and principles in a deliberative and conscious fashion to judge right from wrong. If so, you would expect that participants who had time to consciously deliberate about the fairness of job procedures would be most accurate in their justice judgments.
What Ham and his colleagues found was that justice accuracy scores were higher in the unconscious-thought condition than in the immediate and conscious-thought conditions (these latter two conditions didn’t differ in accuracy). To the authors, this hinted at a kind of unconscious morality that outperforms both deliberative moral reasoning and rapid moral intuition.
Again, the reason may lie in the way that information is weighted in the conscious versus the unconscious mind. Justice judgments are often complex and involve lots of information that needs to be appropriately integrated in the formation of a judgment. Immediate judgments don’t give us enough time to adequately weight all the relevant information, and conscious judgments involve biased weighting schemes. As in judgments of jams and cars and paintings, the lazy, unconscious mind weights morally relevant information appropriately, relatively free of bias, and so leads to more accurate judgments.
The idea of slow
Gray, wrinkled, bingo, Florida.
If you were now to get up from your chair and walk to your kitchen, you would do so more slowly having read these words than if you hadn’t read them. ‘Gray’, ‘wrinkled’, ‘bingo’ and ‘Florida’ are all part of the stereotype of elderly people. Any other stereotypical terms come to mind? ‘Blue rinse’, ‘knitting’?
When John Bargh, a social psychologist at New York University at the time of this study, and his colleagues Mark Chen and Lara Burrows presented participants with these words and others, embedded in scrambled sentences, something quite remarkable happened.32 After unscrambling the sentences containing elderly stereotype words, participants were told that the study was over and that they could leave. In fact, the study wasn’t quite over yet. The experimenters surreptitiously timed participants as they walked from the experiment room to a nearby lift. In one of the most fascinating findings in the past couple of decades of social psychology research, Bargh found that participants exposed to the elderly stereotype took significantly longer to reach the lift than did those in a control condition, who unscrambled sentences containing neutral words.
This effect is another example of priming. When people are exposed to words like ‘Florida’ and ‘wrinkled’, activation spreads from these to other, related concepts that are linked because they are part of the elderly stereotype.
What happened in Bargh’s study was that exposure to the elderly stereotype primed the concept ‘slow’, and this activation leaked out into behaviour, slowing participants down.
So just thinking about slowness, and not even intentionally, can impact the way we act. Walking down a hallway is innocuous enough, but the concept of slow, when primed, can have quite beneficial consequences.
In a study applying Bargh’s work to driving, Rob Gray and Russell Branaghan of Arizona State University primed participants with the elderly stereotype and then put them in a driving simulator.33 What Gray and Branaghan noticed was that drivers were more cautious when operating under the elderly stereotype prime than when under no prime. (They also found that the teenage stereotype, primed with words like ‘sophomore’ and ‘date’, sped drivers up.)
The most startling thing about this research is that these primes work unconsciously. Participants aren’t aware that the concept of ‘slow’ has been primed, yet it nevertheless exerts a considerable force on people’s behaviour, bringing out their inner sloths and, in this case, making them better drivers.
Slow and steady
In 1999, four Italian towns signed a pledge to take it all a bit easier, to slow down and smell the roses, or whatever floral delights happened to grace the Italian countryside. This pledge initiated a movement, Cittaslow (‘Slow Cities’), which has since, somewhat ironically if not self-defeatingly, picked up considerable momentum. More and more, cities and towns around the world are opting to slow down, embracing many of the Cittaslow manifesto’s fifty-five pledges. From cutting traffic and noise to expanding pedestrian and green zones, towns from Katoomba in Australia to Ludlow in England and Sonoma in the United States have all worked hard to ease the pace of life and earn the coveted Cittaslow certification.
Of course, some places are already slower than others and don’t really need to hear Cittaslow activists preaching the virtues of sloth. California State University psychologist Robert Levine and his students have spent a considerable amount time studying the pace of life around the world. Over the years Levine has collected data from cities in over thirty countries and has been able to rank them from fastest to slowest.34 Of course, measuring a country’s speed is no straightforward task, but Levine eventually settled on three indicators: walking speed (the speed at which pedestrians cover sixty feet); work speed (the speed at which postal clerks complete the sale of a stamp); and the accuracy of public clocks (a benchmark meant to assess a country’s overall concern with time).
So which country is the fastest overall? It’s Switzerland. Not surprisingly, they rank number one on clock accuracy. They are also up there on the other measures. Then come Ireland, Germany and Japan, with Italy ranked fifth (Cittaslow was sensible to start its mission at home). This top five grouping is consistent with Levine’s other work, which suggests that people tend to move faster in large, industrialized cities with vibrant economies and cool climates.35 At the bottom of the list we have the more slothful, slower countries: Syria, El Salvador, Brazil, Indonesia and, slowest of all, Mexico.
Some countries may be more sloth-prone than others, but does it matter? Implicit in slow movements of all kinds, from Slow Cities to Slow Sex and Slow Schooling, is the notion that easing the pace of life is a good thing – that slowing down will bring more happiness and health and myriad other blessings. Well, is it true? Are slow cities somehow better off than fast ones? It appears so.
When Levine turned his attention from different countries to different cities within the United States, he found that inhabitants of American cities with faster walking, talking and working speeds were at higher risk of developing coronary heart disease.36
But it’s other work by Levine that provides one of the clearest insights into the virtues of sloth. In 2008, with Stephen Reysen and Ellen Ganz, both also at California State University at the time, Levine asked: ‘Does the pace of life in cities have any effect on helping behaviour?’37 Here’s what these researchers did to answer this question.
First, they measured the pace of life in twenty-four US cities. These cities were sampled from the stereotypically torpid South (e.g. Louisville, Nashville, Dallas), through the West and Midwest, and up to the frenetic Northeast (e.g. New York, Boston). In each of these cities, the researchers measured pedestrian walking speed across sixty feet as an indication of pace of life. (Just for the record, New York doesn’t top the list of fastest US cities. It ranks seventh, with people taking an average of 13.10 seconds to cover sixty feet. San Francisco is the fastest at 12.44 seconds.)38
Next, they measured helping behaviour in these cities using three different yet equally clever techniques:
1. The dropped pen. The experimenter, while walking toward a subject, ‘accidentally’ dropped his pen in the subject’s full view. A second experimenter, following twenty to thirty feet behind, recorded whether the subject displayed helping behaviour. The subject was deemed to have helped if she picked up and returned the pen or called out to the first experimenter, telling him that he’d dropped it.
2. The hurt leg. Here the experimenter, decked out in a leg brace and limping heavily along the sidewalk, approached a subject and ‘accidentally’ dropped a pile of magazines. Again, if the subject offered to help or actually assisted the ostensibly injured man in retrieving his magazines, she was deemed to have helped.
3. Change for a quarter. The experimenter walked straight up to a subject, quarter in hand, and asked politely for change. If subjects checked their pockets for coins, they were deemed to have helped.
So does walking speed influence any of these helping behaviours? It certainly does. Whether it’s picking up pens or magazines, or searching for change, people in slower cities do more of it.
Granted, this study comes with all the interpretational ambiguity of any correlational design. It leaves open the question of causality. We can’t tell whether walking slowly somehow causes more helping, whether helpful people tend to dawdle, or whether some third variable leads people both to slow down and to help.
To clarify the causal connection, we need an experiment. Thankfully, we have one in the shape of an elegantly designed classic of social psychology, a study that has come to be known as the ‘Good Samaritan’ study.39
We were reminded of the Good Samaritan parable in the lust chapter. For those who have forgotten:
A guy gets beaten up and pretty much left for dead on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. As he lies on the roadside, he is passed by a priest and a Levite (who was also a religious functionary), who fail to offer any help. But a passing Samaritan stops and helps, bandaging the man’s wounds and taking him to an inn.
The obvious moral of this story – that religious belief doesn’t, in and of itself, make one a good person – occurred to John Darley and Daniel Batson, both psychologists at Princeton at the time, but so too did something a little less obvious. They reasoned that because Samaritans occupied a rather low rung on the social ladder, they may have been operating on a more relaxed time schedule than the high-ranking priests and Levites. In their words: ‘One can imagine the priest and Levite, prominent public figures, hurrying along with little black books full of meetings and appointments, glancing furtively at their sundials. In contrast, the Samaritan would likely have far fewer and less important people counting on him to be at a particular place at a particular time, and therefore might be expected to be in less of a hurry than the prominent priest or Levite.’40 In other words, it seems as though Samaritans had their own Cittaslow movement going on.
This is an interesting thought, but how to be certain? Like all good psychologists, Darley and Batson decided to test the idea, and to do so, they recreated the Good Samaritan parable on the Princeton campus. Here’s how.
They recruited seminary students to take part in a study, ostensibly on religious education. In a first testing session they measured aspects of these students’ religious convictions: is religion, for you, a quest for meaning? Is it a means to an end? And so on. In a second session, the experimenters staged the parable. Students reported to this second session and were told that they’d have to deliver a short talk, three to five minutes long. For half the students, the talk was to be about jobs to which seminary students would be suited; for the other half, the talk was to concern the parable of the Good Samaritan, a copy of which was provided.
Next came the key manipulation.
Students were told that the building they were in was a little short on space and that they’d have to report to another building, just next door, across an alley, to give their talks. One third was told to hurry: they were late and they should dash across as fast as they could. Another third was told that they were expected any minute. These participants were, in the words of the experimenters, in an ‘intermediate-hurry’. And the final third was given the impression that they had all the time in the world.
Out in the alley, participants came across a man slumped in the doorway, a man that Darley and Batson were determined should look ‘somewhat ambiguous – ill-dressed, possibly in need of help, but also possibly drunk or even potentially dangerous’.41
So just how Samaritan-like were these students? Did they help? Overall, only 40 per cent of these students (seminary students, don’t forget) offered some form of help. But of more interest to us is the difference in helping between the hurry conditions. Of those students who were told that they were late and to hurry, only 10 per cent offered any help. Of those with plenty of time, a more encouraging 63 per cent helped the victim. (The intermediate hurriers were intermediately helpful: 45 per cent helped.)
Slowing down brings out the altruist in us. But why? It’s unlikely that sluggishness, through some witchery, reweaves our moral fibre or reveals some previously unthought-of moral truth, transforming us into unusually caring, selfless human beings. Rather, easing the pace, releasing the inner sloth, and getting our heads out of our own concerns allows us to attend a little more closely to the needs of others.
By slowing down, we overcome what social psychologist Stanley Milgram termed ‘psychological overload’.42 In modern, industrialized societies, especially in the large cities in these societies, we are bombarded with sensory information of all kinds. In an effort to cope, we block out what isn’t relevant to our current goals. So it’s not that fast movers are less moral, it’s just that they have blinkers on to anything that could potentially distract them from their current purpose.43
The Cittaslow manifesto is rather hefty at fifty-five pledges. Still, the work covered in this chapter suggests that we could bulk out the manifesto just a little. We could add more sleeping, napping and daydreaming; less effortful, conscious thought; and walking a bit more slowly. As with the other sins, sloth does have its drawbacks. Indulge it too often and you’ll never get anything done. But indulge it appropriately and you’ll be smarter and perhaps even a little more virtuous for your (lack of) effort.