→ February 21, 2025
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How to Be Enough.

On my dormant (hopefully not extinct!) podcast, I had Dr. Ellen Hendriksen on as a guest to discuss her first book, How to Be Yourself, about dealing with social anxiety and the penchant many of us have for self-doubt and self-criticism. Her second book, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists, shifts its focus to the perfectionist in most of us, if not all of us, running through enough facets of perfectionism that you’re very likely to find something in here that applies to your own life.

Full disclosure: I haven’t met Dr. Hendriksen, but I know her brother well enough that I have stayed at his house and discussed dinosaurs with his kids.

Perfectionism isn’t an actual diagnosis, although it can be a symptom of or just come along with some psychological conditions, including anxiety and depression. Hendriksen makes it clear up front that she is talking about a sort of small-p perfectionism here, the sort that can show up in just about anybody, whether or not you’re dealing with anything else at the same time. The little voice that won’t let you forget something you did that wasn’t perfect, or that won’t let you try something because you might not do it perfectly? That’s her target, with some easy to implement tips to get around that voice, since, if you’ve heard it, you know ignoring it doesn’t work. It’s a narrow focus that works in the book’s favor, especially since she still covers a lot of ground in a modest page count.

Hendriksen begins by comparing two iconic perfectionists, Walt Disney and Fred (as in Mister) Rogers. Both were successful in their lines of work because they were so exacting, with high expectations of others and perhaps even high expectations of themselves. The difference is that Disney was, by this account, a rather miserable person, and equally miserable to be around, while Rogers remains famous for his magnanimous and empathic nature, not just on air but in his everyday life. The argument here is that Rogers was a paragon of self-acceptance and self-compassion, while Disney never learned those skills.

I certainly recognized myself in several chapters of How to Be Enough, whether it was the way I am now or the way I was when I was younger. The way Disney and others in the book would lash out at others was definitely me earlier in my career and personal life; it took a lot of therapy and practice to accept that my own failings weren’t always someone else’s fault, and that others didn’t have to live up to my arbitrary and often ridiculous standards, nor was it right to be rude or unpleasant even if they did do something wrong. People make mistakes. It’s a platitude to say to err is human, of course, but it’s not a matter of divine forgiveness to brush it off and move on; it’s just being a decent person, whether it’s to your colleague or some random customer service person on the phone – or to yourself, which is just as much a focus of this book as how you treat others.

Perhaps the greatest value in How to Be Enough for me was to see that things I always thought were unusual about my brain are apparently pretty common. She cites many examples of people dealing with intrusive thoughts of ‘mistakes’ from earlier in life, even childhood, and often needing to clear those thoughts with a profanity or a shake of the head or something similar. I do that all the fucking time, often over things that happened 40 years ago. She also has several people describe how external pressures deterred them from pursuing whatever subject or skill they excelled at, whether it was straight burnout or the weight of expectations that they’d be perfect or else they failed. For me, it happened with math first, and then STEM as a whole – I was good at them at an early age, and so the spotlight was increasingly on me for that, and anything less than a perfect grade or score was a disappointment. I loved math, both applied and theoretical, and enjoyed almost all science (except biology, not mathy enough) and anything relating to coding. By the time I got out of high school, I was so over being the math kid, or dealing with everyone’s expectations that I’d become a scientist or a doctor, that I went completely the other way into the soft sciences – political science first (‘government’ at my college, which was more akin to political philosophy), then sociology and economics, which are about as soft as you can get. I took one math class, for fun, and of course I enjoyed it because it didn’t matter at all how I did. If I could do it all over again, I’d major in applied math, because I would have absolutely loved it and probably would have done really well as a result, but my experiences as a kid – especially those god damned math fairs they held in my county – made math very un-fun for a while.

How to Be Enough covers a lot of ground in only about 260 pages. There’s a chapter on why we procrastinate and how to get around it; on how perfectionism makes us take fun activities and turn them into tasks, even scolding ourselves for doing things that are fun and nothing more; and on how it’s okay to like doing something even if you’re not good at it. That last one is definitely aimed at me; I have a lot of hobbies, and when I pursue one, I go all in, because I want to keep getting better. I don’t like doing things I don’t do well. It’s why I seldom enjoy dancing (unless I’ve had a few), which of course is a very common condition and which Hendriksen covers in the book rather uncomfortably. Some of the problems she describes are inward-focused, where we judge ourselves to a ridiculous standard and thus lose pleasure or interest in something, while others are more outward-focused, where we believe others are judging us and thus we lose pleasure or interest in something. It all stems from the same source, and the result is the same: We are less happy, and we do less of the stuff we want to do. The way Hendriksen structured How to Be Enough should let anyone who deals with this issue, no matter how much or how specific, find something to help them break out of the perfectionism trap.

Next up: I’m halfway through W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and I think I hate it. 

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→ October 3, 2024
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Happier Hour.

I heard Dr. Cassie Holmes talk about her book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most and her approach to time management, making sure we get the most out of the limited free time most of us have, on the Hidden Brain podcast a month or so ago. She was an excellent guest, telling some great anecdotes and offering a superficial look at her recommendations for people to reorganize their time around the activities that give them the most joy or pleasure. The book, however, goes no deeper than that, and really could have been a pamphlet for all the insight it offers.

Happier Hour’s main advice is simple to understand and plan, albeit perhaps not to implement. Holmes asks readers to spend about two weeks tracking their time in small increments, writing down what they’re doing and how they felt while doing it. The goal is to identify the activities that give you the most happiness, however you may define that. That’s often social activities with family, friends, etc., but it will vary by person – you might enjoy solving a puzzle by yourself more than playing a game with friends, and if so, then you should enter that in your little journal.

Once you’ve gathered that information, you should then create a schedule of your week, filling in the activities that you must do before you get to anything else. Holmes distinguishes between types of required activities, however; for many people, there will be aspects of work that you enjoy, and aspects that you don’t enjoy but have to do anyway. (One recurring problem with Happier Hour, though, is that this is very much a book for privileged people. Here, you have to have a job that gives you some flexibility in when you perform required tasks, at the very least.) Her advice is to isolate the best parts of work – the ones that give you some positive feeling, however you wish to define that – and dedicate time to them at the time(s) of day when you feel best. She’s a morning person, and she likes the deep work parts of her job, so she sets aside a few hours each morning for it, delaying the lesser parts of the job, like answering emails, to the afternoon when she’s not at her best anyway.

She counsels the same approach to your leisure hours – some of which will, again, involve required tasks, like making dinner, chauffeuring children or other family members, or performing certain chores. As I write this, I just emptied the garbage and recycling bins in the kitchen, dealt with the cats’ litter, and took the trash bins to the curb, a required task I perform every Wednesday. That would be on my calendar, each Wednesday night, taking up maybe 15 minutes at most. Once those fixed tasks are in place, I would then fill I the remaining time with activities that give me the most joy and with required tasks that can be performed at any time, again prioritizing the good stuff for times when I feel my best. (This also would require that I know when I feel my best. It depends on the day.)

That’s all there is to the Happier Hour system, aside from some minor details. Beyond that, the book is fluff – a little research here and there on how social activities tend to make us happiest, how experiences beat acquisitions (no kidding), or how social media sucks, plus some mostly cute stories from Holmes’ own life (along with one pretty lousy one). I don’t mind hearing about the author’s experiences when they relate to the book; her decision to leave a prestigious but intense job that was cutting into her time with her young children is understandable, and there’s a straight line from that to the research she does now at UCLA. However, they also underscore how this book is only for a small sliver of the population: It is way, way easier to execute the program in Happier Hour if you’re either rich, or in a flexible job (like mine, come to think of it), or both. So many of her stories just scream wealth and privilege: oh, you have a weekly coffee-and-hot-cocoa date on Thursday mornings with your preschool-aged daughter? How nice for you, but most of your readers with kids that young will take them to day care or similar arrangements so they can go to their not flexible jobs.

I say this with full awareness that my job is flexible – I’m a writer, and as long as I hit my deadlines, I could write at any time of the day I wanted. I could do it from 2 to 4 in the morning if I wanted to. (I do not.) And I could write from anywhere; in the offseason, I don’t even need to be in this hemisphere, as long as I have a phone and an internet connection. I am in the target audience for this book. I just didn’t feel very moved by it, and by the time I was about 2/3 of the way through, I was just annoyed by how much extra verbiage there was around something that could be described in under ten pages. This book could have been a podcast, and in fact, it was.

Next up: Still reading Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars.

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→ January 13, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 1/13/24.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a breakdown of the Michael Busch trade for prospects and another of the Cubs signing Shota Imanaga. Somehow, this brought the Matt Mervis stans back out off hiding.

At Paste, I published a full review of the game The White Castle, my top new game of 2023. Fries are extra.

I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter earlier in the week. You should sign up, as I’m posting less to Twitter these days, although you can also find me on Threads, Bluesky, and Spoutible.

A light week for links, probably because I was on the phone so much working on prospect stuff that I was offline more than usual (at least twice because my eyes hurt from so much screen time)…

  • Nigerian megachurch leader TB Joshua, who was not a drag queen, tortured, raped, and abused many of his worshippers until his death in 2021. A BBC investigation found cases of all of the above as well as forced abortions and cult-like control spanning twenty years.
  • Are fast-food prices really going up, and if so, is it because of rising wages? It’s not that simple, according to this story on Vox. Input prices have gone up substantially in the last few years as well. Also, the $18 Big Mac story that went viral was about a McDonald’s at a rest stop with a captive audience.
  • Paste profiled SPRINTS as the Irish punk band released their first full-length album Letter to Self.
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→ September 4, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 9/4/22.

One new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at some of the more significant or interesting September callups from the last seven days. Some other good names, like Triston Casas, came up after I wrote it.

My podcast returned this week with Dan Pfeiffer, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama and author of the new book Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And now, the links…

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→ November 16, 2021
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Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) is the story of cognitive dissonance, from its origins in the 1950s – one of the authors worked with Dr. Leon Festinger, the man who coined the term – to the modern day, when we routinely hear politicians, police officers, and sportsball figures employ it to avoid blame for their errors. What Dr. Carol Tavris and Dr. Elliot Aronson, the authors of the book, emphasize in Mistakes Were Made, however, is that this is not mere fecklessness, or sociopathy, or evil, but a natural defense mechanism in our brains that protects our sense of self.

Cognitive dissonance refers to the conflict that arises in our brains when an established belief runs into contradictory information. We have the choice: Admit our beliefs were mistaken, and conform our beliefs to the new information; or, explain away the new information, by dismissing it, or interpreting it more favorably (and less accurately), so that our preconceived notions remain intact. You can see this playing out right now on social media, where anti-vaxxers and COVID denialists will refuse to accept the copious amounts of evidence undermining their views, claiming that any contradictory research came from “Pharma shills,” or was in unreliable journals (like JAMA or BMJ, you know, sketchy ones) or offering specious objections, like the possible trollbot account claiming a sample size of 2300 was too small.

The term goes back to the 1950s, however, when a deranged Wisconsin housewife named Dorothy Martin claimed she’d been communicating with an alien race, and a bunch of other morons followed her, in some cases selling their worldly possessions, because the Earth was going to be destroyed and the aliens were coming to pick them up and bring them to … I don’t know where, the fifth dimension or something. Known as the Seekers, they were inevitably disappointed when the aliens didn’t know. The crazy woman at the head of the cult claimed that the aliens had changed their minds, and her followers had somehow saved the planet after all.

What interested Festinger and his colleagues was how the adherents responded to the obvious disconfirmation of their beliefs. The aliens didn’t come, because there were no aliens. Yet many of the believers still believed, despite the absolute failure of the prophecy – giving Festinger et al the name of their publication on the aftermath, When Prophecy Fails. The ways in which these people would contort their thinking to avoid the reality that they’d just fallen for a giant scam, giving up their wealth, their jobs, sometimes even family connections to chase this illusion opened up a new field of study for psychologists.

Tavris and Aronson take this concept and pull it forward into modern contexts so we can identify cognitive dissonance in ourselves and in others, and then figure out what to do about it when it rears its ugly head. They give many examples from politicians, such as the members of the Bush Administration who said it wasn’t torture if we did it – a line of argument that President Obama did not reject when he could have – even though we were torturing people at Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, and other so-called “black sites.” They also show how cognitive dissonance works in more commonplace contexts, such as how it can affect married couples’ abilities to solve conflicts between them – how we respond to issues big and small in our marriages (or other long-term relationships) can determine whether these relationships endure, but we may be stymied by our minds’ need to preserve our senses of self. We aren’t bad people, we just made mistakes – or mistakes were made, by someone – and it’s easier to remain believers in our inherent goodness if we deny the mistakes, or ascribe them to an external cause. (You can take this to the extreme, where abusers say that their victims “made” them hit them.)

There are two chapters here that I found especially damning, and very frustrating to read because they underscore how insoluble these problems might be. One looks at wrongful convictions, and how prosecutors and police officers refuse to admit they got the wrong guy even when DNA evidence proves that they got the wrong guy. The forces who put the Central Park Five in prison still insisted those five innocent men were guilty even after someone else admitted he was the sole culprit. The other troubling chapter looked at the awful history of repressed memory therapy, which is bullshit – there are no “repressed memories,” so the whole idea is based on a lie. Memories can be altered by suggestion, however, and we have substantial experimental research showing how easily you can implant a memory into someone’s mind, and have them believe it was real. Yet therapists pushed this nonsense extensively in the 1980s, leading to the day care sex abuse scares (which put many innocent people in jail, sometimes for decades), and some still push it today. I just saw a tweet from someone I don’t know who said he was dealing with the trauma of learning he’d been sexually abused as a child, memories he had repressed and only learned about through therapy. It’s nonsense, and now his life – and probably that of at least one family member – will be destroyed by a possibly well-meaning but definitely wrong therapist. Tavris and Aronson provide numerous examples, often from cases well-covered in the media, of therapists insisting that their “discoveries” were correct, or displaying open hostility to evidence-based methods and even threatening scientists whose research showed that repressed memories aren’t real.

I see this stuff play out pretty much any time I say something negative about a team. I pointed out on a podcast last week that the Mets have overlooked numerous qualified candidates of color, in apparent violation of baseball’s “Selig rule,” while reaching well beyond normal circles and apparently targeting less qualified candidates. The response from some Met fans was bitter acknowledgement, but many Met fans responded by attacking me, claiming I couldn’t possibly know what I know (as if, say, I couldn’t just call or text a reported candidate to see if he’d been contacted), or to otherwise defend the Mets’ bizarre behavior. Many pointed out that they tried to interview the Yankees’ Jean Afterman, yet she has made it clear for years that she has no interest in a GM job, which makes this request – if it happened at all – eyewash, a way to appear to comply with the Selig rule’s letter rather than its intent. Allowing cognitive dissonance to drive an irrational defense of yourself, or your family, or maybe even your company is bad enough, but allowing it to make you an irrational defender of a sportsball team in which you have no stake other than your fandom? I might buy a thousand copies of Craig Calcaterra’s new book and just hand it out at random.

Theauthors updated Mistakes Were Made in 2016, in a third edition that includes a new prologue and updates many parts of the text, with references to more recent events, like the murders of Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, so that the text doesn’t feel as dated with its extensive look at the errors that led us into the Iraq War. I also appreciated the short section on Andrew Wakefield and how his paper has created gravitational waves of cognitive dissonance that we will probably face until our species drives itself extinct. I couldn’t help but wonder, however, how the authors might feel now about Michael Shermer, who appears in a story about people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens (he had such an experience, but knew it was the result of a bout of sleep paralysis) and who provides a quote for the back of the book … but who was accused of sexual harassment and worse before this last edition was published. Did cognitive dissonance lead them to dismiss the allegations (from multiple women) and leave the story and quote in place? The authors are human, too, and certainly as prone to experiencing cognitive dissonance as anyone else is. Perhaps it only strengthens the arguments in this short and easy-to-read book. Mistakes Were Made should be handed to every high school student in the country, at least until we ban books from schools entirely.

Next up: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

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→ November 13, 2021
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Stick to baseball, 11/13/21.

My one new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week looked at some 2022 draft prospects from last month’s Future Stars Main Event at Citi Field. My ranking of the top 50 free agents on the market this offseason went up last week, also for subscribers.

My latest game review for Paste looks at Brew, a midweight game with incredible art that I couldn’t warm up to – the combination of area control, resource management, worker placement, and take-that mechanics left me feeling more confused than anything. It really does look great, though.

On the Keith Law Show this week, my guest was Sam Ezersky, the digital puzzles editor for the New York Times and the guy you should all yell at when the Spelling Bee doesn’t take ACIDEMIA. You can listen and subscribe on Apple or Spotify. On the Athletic Baseball Show this week, Derek Van Riper and I talked about the Mets’ disastrous GM search, among other things.

As the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

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→ November 6, 2021
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Stick to baseball, 11/6/21.

My one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic ranks the top 50 free agents in this winter’s class. I also held a Zoom Q&A via The Athletic’s Twitter account. I feel like those don’t get as many questions as my old Periscopes did, so please let me know how I can make it easier for you to ask questions when I do them.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Terraforming Mars Ares Expedition, the shorter, streamlined version of the massive Terraforming Mars board game. I think it’s better than the original, which is a heavy (physically and in terms of complexity) two-hour affair that just doesn’t benefit enough from the difficulty or length it entails.

My podcast was off this past week, but will return this Tuesday with a new episode. I was on the Athletic Baseball Show again on Friday, which you can catch on Apple or Spotify.

As the holidays approach, I’ll remind you all every week that I have two books out, The Inside Game and Smart Baseball, that would make great gifts for the readers (especially baseball fans) on your lists.

And now, the links…

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→ September 10, 2021
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Noise.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman’s first book, Thinking Fast and Slow, has been hugely influential on the baseball industry and on my own career, inspiring me to write The Inside Game as a way to bring some of the same concepts to a broader audience. Kahneman is back with a sequel of sorts, co-authoring the book Noise: A Human Flaw in Human Judgment with Cass Sunstein and Oliver Sibony, that shifts the focus away from cognitive biases towards a different phenomenon, one that the authors call “noise.”

Noise, in their definition, involves “variability in judgments that should be identical.” They break this down into three different types of noise, all of which add up together to be “system noise.” (There’s a lot of jargon in the book, and that’s one of its major drawbacks.)

  • Level noise, where different individuals make different judgments across different sets of data. The authors cite “some judges are generally more severe than others, and others are more lenient” as an example.
  • Pattern noise, where different individuals make different judgments with the same data.
  • Occasion noise, where an individual makes different judgment depending on when they see the data (which can literally mean the time of day or day of the week). This is probably the hardest for people to accept, but there’s clear evidence that doctors prescribe more opioids near the end of a work day, and judges are more lenient when the local football team won on Sunday.

There’s a hierarchy of noise here, where level noise comprises pattern noise, and pattern noise comprises occasion noise (which they classify as transient pattern noise, as opposed to “stable” pattern noise, which would be, say, how I underrate hitting prospects with high contact rates but maybe Eric Longenhagen rates them consistently more highly). That’s the entire premise of Noise; the book devotes its time to exploring noise in different fields, notably the criminal justice system and medicine, where the stakes are so high and the benefit of a reduction in noise is likely to justify the costs, and to ways we can try to reduce noise in our fields of work.

As with Thinking Fast and Slow, Noise doesn’tmake many accommodations for the lay reader. There’s an expectation here that you are comfortable with the vernacular of behavioral economics and with some basic statistical arguments. It’s an arduous read with a strong payoff if you can get through it, but I concede that it was probably the hardest I’ve worked to read (and understand) anything I’ve read this year. It doesn’t help that noise is itself a more abstruse concept than bias, and the authors make constant references to the difference here.

Some of the examples here will be familiar if you’ve read any literature on behavioral economics before. The sentencing guidelines that resulted from Marvin Frankel, a well-known judge and human rights advocate, pointing out the gross inequities that resulted from giving judges wide latitude in sentencing – resulting in sentences that might range from a few months to 20 years for two defendants convicted the same crime. (The guidelines that resulted from Frankel’s work were later struck down by the Supreme Court, which not only reintroduced noise into the system, but restored old levels of racial bias in sentencing as well.) The authors also attempt to bring noise identification and noise reduction into the business world, with some examples where they brought evidence of noise to the attention of executives who sometimes didn’t believe them.

Nothing was more familiar to me than the discussion of the low value of performance evaluations in the workplace. For certain jobs, with measurable progress and objectives, they may make sense, but in my experience across a lot of jobs in several industries, they’re a big waste of time – and I do mean a big one, because if you add up the hours dedicated to filling out the forms required, writing them up, conducting the reviews, and so on, that’s a lot of lost productivity. One problem is that there’s a lack of consistency in ratings, because raters do not have a common frame of reference for their grades, making grades more noise than signal. Another is that raters tend not to think in relative terms, so you end up with oxymoronic results like 98% of employees grading out as above average. The authors estimate that 70-80% of the output from traditional performance evaluations is noise – meaning it’s useless for its intended purpose of allowing for objective evaluation of employee performance, and thus also useless for important decisions like pay raises, promotions, and other increases in responsibility. Two possible solutions: ditching performance evaluations altogether, using them solely for developmental purposes (particularly 360-degree systems, which are rather in vogue), or spend time and money to train raters and develop evaluation metrics that have objective measurements or “behaviorally anchored” rating scales.

It wouldn’t be a Daniel Kahneman product if Noise failed to take aim at one of his particular bêtes noires, the hiring interview. He explained why they’re next to worthless in Thinking Fast and Slow, and here he does it again, saying explicitly, “if your goal is to determine which candidates will succeed in a job and which will fail, standard interviews … are not very informative. To put it more starkly, they are often useless.” There’s almost no correlation between interview success and job performance, and that’s not surprising, because the skills that make someone good at interviewing would only make them a better employee if the job in question also requires those same skills, which is … not most jobs. Unstructured interviews, the kind most of us know, are little more than conversations, and they serve as ideal growth media for noise. Two interviewers will have vastly differing opinions of the same candidate, even if they interview the candidate together as part of a panel. This pattern noise is amplified by the occasion noise prompted by how well the first few minutes of an interview go. (They don’t mention something I’ve suspected: You’ll fare better in an interview if the person interviewing you isn’t too tired or hungry, so you don’t want to be the last interview before lunch or the last one of the day.) They cite one psychology experiment where researchers assigned students to role-play interviews, splitting them between interviewer and candidate, and then told half of the candidates to answer questions randomly … and none of the interviewers caught on.

There’s plenty of good material here in Noise, concepts and recommended solutions that would apply to a lot of industries and a lot of individuals, but you have to wade through a fair bit of jargon to get to it. It’s also less specific than Thinking Fast and Slow, and I suspect that reducing noise in any environment is going to be a lot harder than reducing bias (or specific biases) would be. But the thesis that noise is at least as significant a problem in decision-making as bias is should get wider attention, and it’s hard to read about the defenses of the “human element” in sentencing people convicted of crimes and not think of how equally specious defenses of the “human element” in sports can be.

Next up: Martha Wells’ Nebula & Locus Award-winning novel Network Effect, part of her MurderBot series.

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→ October 28, 2020
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The Everyday Parenting Toolkit.

The Everyday Parenting Toolkit is a very specific set of tools for parents, with guidelines that apply to kids of just about any age but a stronger focus on kids younger than about nine. The subject here is behavior, and behavior change, and the book, authored by Dr. Alan Kazdin, describes some pretty simple rules for engendering behavior change in children that focus on positive steps more than negative, certainly different than the way I think most or at least many people parent. It’s often difficult to get through because Kazdin calls every step of the method by its technical name, but this is evidence-based behavior management, and could help all of us with kids get out of the cycles of discipline and punishment that don’t really work to create the changes you want.

The basics of the method revolve around the A-B-C framework of Antecedents, Behavior, and Consequences. Before you can do any of this, however, you have to define the behavior you want, and do so in clear terms that you can communicate to your child and that your child can understand in a way that they can execute. If you can’t explain it to yourself, or to your spouse or partner, in simple terms, then your child isn’t going to be able to follow it and make the change you want.

Antecedents come before the behavior in question, and changing them can change the behavior – thus, you create an environment with incentives (or disincentives) to encourage the behavior you want. Depending on the child, the behavior, and how far the status quo is from the desired behavior, you might even choose to simulate the activity and the behavior so that your child has a chance to practice the behavior you want in stages – for example, ‘practicing’ a tantrum, but one with less screaming, or where they keep their body more under control. You need to identify specific behaviors you want to change, rather than general traits like generosity or kindness, and then use Kazdin emphasizes that what you do before the behavior occurs can have far greater impact than what you try to do afterward.

The Behavior stage of his method involves providing reinforcement when you get the behavior you want, or even just part of the behavior you want. This might be the ‘positive opposite,’ where your child is doing the polar opposite of the behavior you want, and thus getting to your desired outcome requires working in stages. You create a plan to get from point A (present behavior) to point B (desired behavior), and develop a program, with any co-parents, to encourage progress with reinforcement – primarily praise, specific praise that is delivered as close in time to the good behavior as possible. The plan should set specific, achievable goals for the child, and each positive step should be met with praise, effusive praise for younger kids especially, and maybe with very modest rewards like a point system.

Consequences are not what you might think, or at least not what I thought they’d be. Kazdin emphasizes the importance of positive reinforcement programs, arguing that they’re just more effective than negative reinforcement (what we usually think of as punishment). Punishments should be mild when used at all, and should be accompanied by a reinforcement program that encourages the ‘positive opposite’ of the offending behavior. (He points out that parents should never use physical discipline, and there is substantial research on the long-term negative outcomes associated with even ‘light’ corporal punishment like spanking, from worse mental health outcomes to decreased immune function. Don’t spank your kids.) You may also need to withhold reinforcement from undesirable behaviors; every parent knows the situation where they’ve had to stop themselves from laughing at something their kid did that you really don’t want them to repeat, but that was actually quite funny. I remember my daughter, then four and a half, saying “Daddy!” and clapping twice to get my attention for something, and I had to turn away so she couldn’t see me cracking up; that would have provided positive reinforcement for a behavior that, while pretty astute (I had clapped a few times to get her attention before), was not something I wanted to see become a habit. Withholding that reinforcement thus would have been a key part of a behavior-change program, had I instituted one at the time.

Kazdin states multiple times that punishment doesn’t work on its own and should be rarely used, and only to decrease some behavior. It can confuse your child if you’re trying to use punishment, especially as a restorative method, while also working to change behavior and ‘impart other lessons.’ Punishment doesn’t teach positive behaviors, only works in the very short term, and often provokes side effects like crying, avoidance, and even aggression (especially if you use corporal punishment). He describes the most effective way to use time outs, including that the first minute of time out does most of the work, and that time outs beyond ten minutes probably do nothing at all.

The remainder of The Everyday Parenting Toolkit is devoted to the need to develop a strong environment, or context, in your home to allow better behaviors to develop; and to real-world examples from families who’ve visited the Yale Parenting Center, where Dr. Kazdin is the director, and the programs the center developed to help those families implement sustainable behavior changes. The context chapter would probably apply to the greatest number of readers, because the eight steps he recommends could start at any time, regardless of how old your kids are, to encourage better behavior or just discourage undesirable behaviors, and perhaps limit the need for you to use the A-B-C method so that it’s more effective and easier for you to maintain.

My daughter is 14, but I still found value in The Everyday Parenting Toolkit for parenting her, as well as far more tips for my partner’s kids, who are both still in the single digits. I have zero background in psychology, but much of what Kazdin recommends here follows principles from behavioral economics – not just incentives and disincentives, but timing (rewards and reinforcements must happen very soon after the behavior), misaligned incentives, and the nonlinear effects of many of these steps, like time outs. Kazdin does rely too much on jargon here, even though it’s a book for the lay audience, and I found it to be a slow read for that reason – seeing “positive opposite” fifty times didn’t make the phrase more meaningful in my head, for example – but there are lessons here I’ll be able to use at home for a long time, and that I think every parent should know.

Next up: I’ve finished Max Porter’s Lanny and am now reading Emily Oster’s Cribsheet.

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→ October 20, 2020
→ By

Biased.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is a social psychologist and professor at Stanford University who received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant in 2014 for her work on implicit bias and how stereotypic associations on race have substantial consequences when they intersect with crime. Her first book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, came out in 2019 and explains much of her work on the topic with concrete and often very moving examples of such bias occurring in the real world – often in Eberhardt’s own life – when Black Americans encounter the police.

The heart of Biased comes from Eberhardt’s work on racial bias and crime, and many of the stories that she uses to illustrate conclusions from broader research efforts involve the murders of unarmed Black men by police. One chapter starts with the shooting of Terence Crutcher, who was shot and killed by a panicked white police officer, Betty Shelby, who was, of course, acquitted of all charges in connection with her actions. (She later said that she was “sorry he lost his life,” as if she wasn’t involved in that somewhow.) Crutcher’s twin sister, Tiffany, has become a prominent activist focusing on criminal justice reform and raising awareness of the role white supremacy plays in endangering Black lives.

Eberhardt uses Crutcher’s story and her words to frame discussions of how implicit bias – the kind of bias that happens beneath our conscious thought process – leads to outcomes like Shelby killing Terence Crutcher. We can all recognize the kind of bias that uses racial slurs, or explicitly excludes some group, or traffics in open stereotypes, but implicit bias can have consequences every bit as significant, and is more insidious because even well-intentioned people can fall prey to it. Multiple studies have found, for example, that white subjects have subconscious associations between Black people and various negative character traits – and some Black subjects did as well, which indicates that these are societal messages that everyone receives, through the news, entertainment, even at school. When police officers have those implicit biases, they might be more likely to assume that a Black man holding a cell phone is actually holding a gun when they wouldn’t make the same assumption with a white man. This becomes a failure of officer training, not a matter of all cops who shoot Black men being overtly racist, while also drawing another line between those who say Black Lives Matter and those who counter that All or Blue or Fuchsia Lives Matter instead.

No other arena has the same stakes as policing and officer-involved shootings, but implicit bias also has enormous consequences in areas like education, hiring, and the housing market. Eberhardt runs through numerous studies showing implicit but unmistakable bias in the employment sphere, such as when test candidates with identical resumes but different names, one of whom bears a name that might imply the candidate is Black, receive calls back at vastly different rates. Implicit bias can explain why we still see evidence of redlining even when the explicit practice – denying the applications of nonwhite renters, or the offers of nonwhite home buyers, to keep white neighborhoods white – has been outlawed since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.

Eberhardt also speaks to Bernice Donald, a Black woman who is now a federal judge but who experienced discrimination in education firsthand as one of the first Black students in DeSoto County, Mississippi, to attend her local whites-only high school, where she was ignored by some white teachers, singled out by faculty and students alike, and denied opportunities for advancement, including college scholarships she had earned through her academic performance. The implicit biases we see today affect not just students’ grades, but how students of different races are disciplined, and how severe such discipline is. Eberhardt doesn’t mention the school-to-prison pipeline, but the research she cites here shows how that pipeline can exist and the role that implicit bias plays in filling it with Black students.

Some of the studies Eberhardt describes in Biased will be familiar if you’ve read any similar books, such as Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi or Banaji & Greenwald’s Blindspot, that cover this ground, but Eberhardt’s look is newer, more comprehensive, and punctuated by deeply personal anecdotes, including a few of her own. While she was a graduate student at Harvard, on the eve of commencement, she and her roommate were pulled over by a Boston police officer for a minor equipment violation, harassed, injured, and brought to the station, where a Dean from their department had to come vouch for their release. She eventually had to go to court, where she was acquitted of all charges – which included a claim that she had injured the officer, a claim the judge ridiculed, according to Eberhardt. Would that have happened if she were white? Would it surprise you to hear that the cop who hassled her and her friend was Black? And what, ultimately, does this, and research showing that Black motorists are far more likely to be stopped for the most trivial of causes and more likely to end up dead when stopped by police, tell us about solutions to the problem of implicit bias in policing? The answers are not easy, because implicit bias is so hard to root out and often isn’t evident until we have enough data to show it’s affecting outcomes. We won’t get to that point if we can’t agree that the problem exists in the first place.

Next up: I just finished Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo last night and am reading Graham Swift’s new novel Here We Are.

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