The Century of the Individual

The advent of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 is a clear example of the paradigmatic shift occurring in this century. As people stop going to work and become confined to their homes the groups and communities they are a part of start shattering. We are no longer tied to our environments the way we used to be. I am writing from the commodity of my home like many others on this day. But this is not the first time we see this transference from our environments. Students no longer flock to libraries for information, they commonly open databases online. We don’t have to pick up a landline and turn the dial ten times to call our family, we simply have to ask Siri to place the call for us. We do not have to go to multiple stores to look for a special screwdriver, we simply order it online and receive it a couple days later in a insipid box. People of the 21st century have given up the actions that join us together for efficiency and self-service. People feel connected to others more stronger than ever, this is seen with the increasing political polarization of the American Public, where fewer American than ever before belong to the overlap between democrats and republicans but feel more connected to their parties (Dimock, Doherty, Kiley & Oates, 2014). This formation of parasocial bonds with people online, increases the connection to our beliefs whether we agree or disagree with the person in contact (Paravati, Naidu, Gabriel & Wiedemann, 2019). There is conflicting literature on the wellness of people when using social media, while it is a good form of mood regulation when people do not wish to be alone, prolonged use may lead to low identity development and loneliness (Thomas et al., 2020). We are entering a new state of a false collective, where we are present in groups without being physically there, connected to other individuals like us from miles away.

The Age of Individuality on The Internet

When a teenager is allowed to venture on the internet in their critical years of identity development (Erikson, 1964), they form new identities with groups online that they would not necessarily be a part of had the internet not existed. This new kind of identity formation in this virtual environment may very well lead to different consequences. For one, when someone is a part of a group that exists online and they set out for their outside physical environment, they are going to be incongruous with it. When their identity is shaped from the virtual group rather than their physical group they are slowly eroding their connection to the physical world. A good example for this is by looking at students who walked the halls of universities one hundred years ago: students were homogenous they wore muted colors, long trousers and skirts. Now a days, students may be wearing everything from business casual attire to casual sporting clothes with fluorescent colors. We are moving into an era of individualism, people are part of smaller groups whether virtual or tangible. This is seen in the academia, people striving to concentrate in the most detailed and Delphic fields possible. This paradigmatic shift from the collective into a false (virtual) collective produces the individual who is able to find its own niche wherever they are. While before we were congruent with the collective, now we are more and more becoming our own individuals among the collective and the static.

The Outrage Machine

Each moral word used in a tweet increases it’s virality by 20 percent (Brady, 2019). Kahneman believes that the affect heuristic, judging the correctness of a claim based on our emotional reactions to it, is the most important heuristic in every-day life. When people are exposed to constant appeals to emotions on the internet they are unconsciously being polarized by their beliefs. When social network algorithms push for emotionally packed claims people are unknowingly falling prey to a cascade, a chain reaction of beliefs being confirmed and reconfirmed until there is nothing that can disprove them. Algorithms want people to see what they are concordant with so they will stay on their website. The more people stay on their website the closer they get to their new “identity” and the further away from people who are incongruent with their selves. Does this mean we will be happier as the only information presented to us does not challenger our beliefs? Not necessarily. There is a dark future ahead. Nikolas Badminton, a world- renowned futurist found at a statistically significant level that 33% of those who spend more than 4 hours online per day had been treated for depression, another 33% had been treated for anxiety and another 31% were self-identified narcissists. This algorithmically-guided behavior has produced a hunger for acceptance from online users creating an alarming turning point for society. Does this mean that we will all become micro-narcissists trying to prove others that we are better, all whilst cultivating unhealthy amounts of anxiety and depression while we fail to do so? With all bad behaviors, counter-behaviors arise to protect the individual. However, when it is no longer in our power to determine what we want to see but up to a profit maximizing algorithm, we may fail to beat the machine.

It is also important to note the rise of memes in popular online culture. Memes are units of cultural transmissions where a truth value is not required. They are spread by emotional selection through emotions like happiness or disgust. They can be anything from a picture of a cat with a funny text on top of it to a behavior that is imitated from person to person within a culture. Memes create a bridge between the individual and the collective, where we as individuals decide to react the same way as everyone else to one of these units of cultural transmission.

The Era of Info Overload

Another alarming aspect of social media is the mass proliferation of information evolving beyond our control. There is the creation of “attentional bottlenecks” which limit our choices based on fear, peer pressure and global groupthink according to Dr. Hills of the University of Warwick (Hills, 2018). He identifies four biases of “cognitive selection” affecting our beliefs online. The first is negative bias, where we overshare negative information even if it is not accurate. This is similar to the media paradox, where media focuses on rare events, making us afraid of things that are the least risky and least afraid of things that are most risky (Ruscio, 2000). The second is belief- consistent bias (similar to confirmation bias), to cope with the gargantuan amounts of information we favor what is consistent with our beliefs, which leads to groupthink. Groupthink can be very harmful as people tend to ignore any and all new information that is incongruent with their beliefs, even if it is beneficial or life-saving. This has huge implications on a global scale as terrorist groups can emerge from online vacuums as well as far reaching political ideologies. The third bias is social bias, where we sacrifice any other kinds of information for “social information”. This may lead to groups finding the fastest solution to problems rather than the best one because of the ease it gets to us with social media. Finally, predictive bias, increases the speed with which our System I processing works. We are biologically engrained to look for patterns, when we are exposed to increasing amounts of information, we find more and more patterns even if they are incorrect. This has implications for academics, as we see now with the replication crisis, where many patterns have been proved to be false after years of believing they were true.

In this new era of information overload we are forced to decided what we think is real and what can heal us. This has consequences for therapy as we have to pick among so many different theories and practices which can be overwhelming, but the future means collectivizing and acknowledging individual differences. It is a tricky balance but it has to happen on the individual level as we are the ones making these decisions.

Global Warming

The best solutions for global warming should be found within the individual rather than the collective. Top down approaches do not seem to work as much as an innate shift of our own personal consciousness. This is why the importance of valuing the individual in a healthy manner may be the only way to find a solution. A model created to discern individuals attitudes towards global warming found that people who experienced first-hand fluctuations in weather (such as warmer summers and colder spring time) were more likely to perceive the existence of global warming (Shao, Garand, Keim & Hamilton, 2016). This is important to note because it shows how the change has to come from the individual’s experience rather than the collective telling them that this threat exists. Another study has found that mindfulness through Buddhist meditation increases the belief in global climate change and pro-environmental outcomes (Panno, 2018). The consequences of mindfulness are many, from increased compassion to better mental functioning. A lesson can be taken from these findings, even though the person is part of a collective practicing these skills, the change and actions come from the individual within the collective. The teachings on how to combat global warming should come from the group and personally devised from the individual. However, as we enter an era of more and more smaller groups, further apart from each other, who is going to show the people what is right and what is wrong?

There have been many distinctions found across cultures which may show the different processes that affect our externalities towards our environment. For example, Ngöbe communities from Panama attribute agency to an ecocentric protoype (focusing on nature and the earth as a whole) whereas American college students ascribe agency to complex artifacts (belongings for example) (Ojalehto, Medin & Garcìa, 2017). If everyone believed in animism following the ecocentric prototype we would probably never litter again. This difference in frameworks may be the answer to fix this negligence towards our environment. By changing the frameworks of what we believe by using methods beyond western practices we may be able to reduce the probability of societies collapsing due to climate change.

Individuality Through Technologies

The industrial revolution (4.0) that came with the internet has ended. We are entering a new era where technology is intermixed with the individual. No longer are things mass produced for everyone, each and every individual can pick and choose the color or the model they want. Another key example if individuality within technologies are brain-machine interfaces, where computers are connected directly to neurons in the brain. This is what Elon Musk is attempting to do with his company ‘Neuralink’. Brain-machine interfaces are expected to help people with neurological disorders by restoring sensory and motor function through small flexible electrode threads that can be neurosurgically inserted into specific brain regions (Musk, 2019). While this is the goal for now, in the near future, my guess is 2040, these interfaces will become more available to the general public and will then be used for multiple other reasons. Not only will we be able to send inputs into the brain to restore motor functioning, outputs will be given back to the machine. This means that we will be able to change our environment without taking any physical actions. For example, when we flip a switch there are feedback loops going to and from our motor neurons and back to our central nervous system. When you remove this whole loop and allow for actions to only happen from our CNS, engaging only sensory neurons (such as our optical nerve) and excluding motor neurons (the ones in our hand to flip the switch) a multitude of biological changes may happen over time. We may become dependent solely on our brains to do work. Writing and calculators will become unnecessary. Search engines will be engrained in our brains, not only will students not need to go to the library or open their computer to do research, all they will have to do is imagine and select what they need without even opening their eyes. Patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases will also be able to walk again the moment we teach our neurons to fix themselves or even be transplanted. When we allow artificial intelligence to learn the mechanisms of our brain we will be able to personalize our own algorithms and to create solutions using the power of computers that we now have at Google.

Nanotechnology is key in modifying our brains. But what about our bodies? As technologies become available to societies, people will take them into their own hands and adapt them for themselves. What we are already seeing nowadays with people inserting microchips into their hands for easier identification, soon will become transplanting whole organs and body parts to better serve our lives. Artists for example, may decide to exchange one of their hands for a robotic prosthesis to allow for easy use of different media. As technologies trickle down and become affordable, we will quickly see a transformation of these technologies to conform to peoples personal needs. Whether for the best or the worst we are entering the cyborg age, where machines and humans become one.

The Conscious “Individual”

The entrance of machine learning into psychology will definitely bring about a greater understanding of the brain and ultimately consciousness. Consciousness is what defines the individual as it is the main difference that determines the reality of our existence. It is of very great probability than we will unlock the secrets of consciousness using AI in the next century. Computer scientists are scrambling to create machine consciousness, also known as synthetic consciousness. Along with them philosophers debate if it can actually be implemented and how. Theoretical neurobiologist Bernard Baars (Baars, 1998) suggests that there are specific main functions that the machine conscious has to achieve, such as: definition & context setting, adaptation & learning, editing, prioritizing & access control, decision-making, executive function, analogy-forming function, metacognitive and self-monitoring function, auto programming and self-maintenance. Now, if this is ever achieved we will have arguably created a new sentient being. This will revolutionize our world and will probably be the beginning of the next paradigmatic shift after the one of individualization I believe we are in now. I would like to speculate that the next paradigm will follow a very big exploration about the truth of our reality, not only that of the individual but also of the collective. If humans will be able to create a prototype of consciousness without unlocking the mysteries of our own, there will be a huge crisis. To create consciousness without understanding how we ourselves are conscious, creates cognitive dissonance at the societal level. Many questions will be raised, and lots of actions will have to be taken. If different types of consciousness exist, then do they differ between animals, plants, objects, machines and societies? Neuroscientists currently believe that consciousness is generated through the neural correlates of consciousness which are neural changes that correlate with someone’s specific experience. That is very similar to memes as they are also correlates that explain a culture’s specific experience. Therefore the understanding of the collective conscious may also be unveiled as machine and human consciousness unfold.

There will always be cynics who reject science, but such a drastic change may create an even larger polarization, where more and more people will reject any and all science. There will be groups that reject machines and medicine, others who only reject machines and others that reject neither. I am worried for the first group, who will sacrifice all science because of the ever more new, controversial and cutting edge technologies

Individualized Therapy

As we enter the middle of the century more and more longitudinal studies will be released about the long term effects of anti-depressants and ADHD medicine used on children. New studies have shown that certain medications permanently alter peoples brains (Wang et al., 2013). As parents scramble to find new ways to treat their children without harmful medicine they will turn to treatments that are beyond western biomedicine such as integrational healing and psychedelics. This change is already happening with mindfulness being implemented in CBT therapy. As these techniques become more prominent we will see an even greater shift into patient-centered healthcare or individualized approaches that value the individual. This can be done by producing drugs that are adjusted to fit someone’s genetic code so that there is the least possible amount of gene drug interactions. This is already done today with Genesight, as it provides a psychotropic test to see if drugs have meaningful interactions with DNA that may harm a patient (Genesight, 2020). As big pharmaceutical companies try and maximize their profits, and interests move from patients to money they will resist this patient-centered care. This is because they are trying to fit the model that one drug fits all, as a panacea for a mental illness lowers research and production costs. Health should not function this way. Doctors through-out history were known to treat patients at home, entering their environments and knowing their families at heart. If we can retool medicine to approach a patients problem with a solution unique to them then that will revolutionize medicine totally beyond what it currently is.

We are moving into a more individualistic era, where individuals are accepted to be part of our communities even if they are not part of our small groups. Our individual differences are prized and we are more than ever accepting the abnormal to be normal, whether it is in psychology or fashion. Our individuality is exponentially growing, I do not know until this phenomenon will last, but hopefully it will not end with the sanguineous revolutions that we have seen, because humans will not be alone anymore.

Works Cited

Dimock, M., Doherty, C., Kiley, J., & Oates, R. (June 12th, 2014). Political Polarization in the American Public. Pew Research Center: Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping the World. doi:202.419.4372

Paravati, E., Naidu, E., Gabriel, S., & Wiedemann, C. (2019). More than just a tweet: The unconscious impact of forming parasocial relationships through social media. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice. https://doiorg.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1037/cns0000214

Thomas, V., Balzer Carr, B., Azmitia, M., & Whittaker, S. (2020). Alone and online: Understanding the relationships between social media, solitude, and psychological adjustment. Psychology of Popular Media. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1037/ppm0000287

Erikson, E. H. (1964). Childhood and society, 2nd ed. Chapter 7, W. W. Norton. Brady, W. J. (2019). A model of moral contagion in online social networks [ProQuest

Information & Learning]. In Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering (Vol. 80, Issue 3–B(E))

Badminton, N. (2020, April 02). Future of Life in America - Digital Obesity and Mental Health. Retrieved May 04, 2020, from https://nikolasbadminton.com/future-of-life-in-america- digiital-obesity-mental-health/

University of Warwick, Psychology. (2018, December 6). Mass proliferation of information evolving beyond our control, says new psychology research [Press release]. Retrieved May 4, 2020, from https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/mass_proliferation_of/

Ruscio, J. (2000). Risky business: Vividness, availability, and the media paradox. Skeptical Inquirer, 24(2), 22-26. [Reprinted in Nisbet, L. (Ed.) (2001). The gun control debate: You
decide (pp. 167-174). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.]

Shao, W., Garand, J. C., Keim, B. D., & Hamilton, L. C. (2016). Science, scientists, and local weather: Understanding mass perceptions of global warming. Social Science Quarterly, 97(5), 1023–1057. https://doi-org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1111/ssqu.12317

Panno, A., Giacomantonio, M., Carrus, G., Maricchiolo, F., Pirchio, S., & Mannetti, L. (2018). Mindfulness, pro-environmental behavior, and belief in climate change: The mediating role of social dominance. Environment and Behavior, 50(8), 864–888. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1177/0013916517718887

Ojalehto, Bethany l., Medin, D. L., & García, S. G. (2017). Grounding principles for inferring agency: Two cultural perspectives. Cognitive Psychology, 95, 50–78. https://doi- org.proxy.library.emory.edu/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.04.001

Musk, E. (2019). An integrated brain-machine interface platform with thousands of channels. BioRxiv The Preprint Server for Biology. doi:10.1101/703801

Baars, Bernard (1988), A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-30133-6

Wang, G., Volkow, N. D., Wigal, T., Kollins, S. H., Newcorn, J. H., Telang, F., . . . Swanson, J. M. (2013). Long-Term Stimulant Treatment Affects Brain Dopamine Transporter Level in Patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. PLoS ONE, 8(5). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063023

Genetic Testing: Personalized Treatments. (n.d.). Retrieved May 05, 2020, from https://genesight.com/endtrialanderror/?creative=352940689885

Sofia Wolfson
Emory University
University of Miami

Closer Than Ever

The elements that transformed the Spanish Flu, that happened between 1918 and 1920, into a catastrophe, which infected over 500 million people and killed 50 million people were distinctive. The first one was the coincidental ending of the Great War where millions of soldiers lived amassed in narrow trenches with poor hygienic conditions and the second was the movement of these troops returning home at the end of the conflict. Millions of people were moving simultaneously from one nation to the other and even between continents. This was the ideal medium for the spread of the virus. The movement of this many people back then was a rare and exceptional event.

Today, the world is radically different. If the COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us one thing, it’s that the world, now more than ever, is small and interconnected, where frontiers have become a fickle creation of our imagination and of our ideologies and where our relationships with other people within and outside our borders entails dependence on each other and vulnerability. The diffusion of the virus, like a radioactive tracer, is allowing us to see these connections that were before invisible, but nonetheless real and palpable. It should then be of common understanding that to safeguard our health systems we must distance ourselves socially.

Less than a decade after the Spanish flu, Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy publishes the short story “Chains”. Using fiction he explores the concept of connections. One of the characters, to try and prove how small the world was at that time (population: 1 billion), hypothesizes the connection of two random people through a chain of less than 5 people.

At that time the concept was unusual, and it alluded to the impossibility of proving that every person on earth is connected to one another in this manner.

Milgram studied this possibility in his 1967 “small-world experiment” to try and give a scientific answer to this phenomena. He sent out packages to 296 people living in Omaha, Nebraska, with instructions asking them to bring the package closer to a stockbroker in Boston, Massachusetts. They were only supposed to mail the package to people they knew on a first name basis and also leave their name in the package so that each transaction would be recorded. Out of the 296 letters sent, only 64 letters eventually reached the stockbroker in Boston. The average length of the chain was between 5.5 and 6. Historically, it seems that no one had used the term six degrees of separation before this experiment. Facebook has also given us a number recently, in 2011, where they found that each user on average is related to other by 3.57 degrees of separation. While this may show us that we are more interconnected, it is good to remember that there is a differentiation between knowing someone online and in real life, or on a first name basis as Milgram put it.

Our level of interdependence is higher than ever, it has become the strength of global nations. There are migrants who will endure arduous journeys to be with their loved ones. Perspectives can be changed daily. While Italy had been refusing migrants coming from Africa for years, in a matter of hours emigration from Italy came to a holt. These same nations who were once being rejected had started closing their borders to Italians due to the coronavirus. This happened in the matter hours, a ripple effect, which propagated the number of nations closing their frontiers increased to hundreds in a matter of days. We see the same thing in America, as Mexico closes its borders on American travelers.

This amount of connections has other consequences, our behaviors have started to be defined by what others do, not only because of social media but because the number of people we are in contact with increases continuously. These connections have a much stronger effect on our decisions than we think. We very well know that other people’s behavior can cause people to take up smoking, getting credit card debt and even the decision to take on recycling. Even in financial markets we see this behavior, with the rush to the banks during the Great Depression, which may have well been a cause of the financial crisis. The same thing is happening now with the stock market fluctuating, following the decisions made by big mutual funds or by people stockpiling toilet paper. Two systems are in place here, the biological and the psychological. It is very likely that natural selection has made us so synchronized with one another. We tend to replicate the majority of what other people do, from small hints of smiles all the way to what car we should buy.

So what else can we learn from the 1918 Spanish Flu? Even though the flu produced just as many deaths as the first world war little economic studies have shown consequences of this pandemic. Angus Maddison, a British macro economist specialized in history found that European GDP had fallen by almost 8% in the matter of two years. We must consider that these years were right after the war where European countries like Germany and France had been torn apart. We usually tend to ignore this pandemic when looking at the Great Depression and tend to attribute it to a reorganization of the economy after the war. I have found few studies that isolate the effects of the pandemic versus the war.

There has been one study done in 2013 by Martin Karlsson, Therese Nilsson and Stefan Pichler that tried to identify the influence of the Spanish flu on the “economic performance” of Sweden. Sweden is an interesting case because they remained neutral during the war. Some regions in Sweden had higher mortality rates than others, and these counties experience much slower growth. They found that each deceased person was replaced by 0.45 minors and 0.42 females, whereas the male labor supply was insignificant. Capital incomes were also strongly negatively impacted, with assets owned by people depreciating. Poverty also increased: with every person deceased there were 4 asking to be housed in state housing. This finding seems to be inconsistent with the other finding of the increased scarcity of labor, where you would expect more labor to alleviate financial burdens, but as explained by the authors it may be due to a significant reduction in average worker quality. Another study done in the USA by Brainerd & Siegler, 2006, suggested that states most hit by the pandemic had higher salaries. This is because the lack of labor increased the demand of workers and increased salaries. COVID-19 attacks the majority people who are out of the workforce, so predicting it’s effects on the basis of older pandemics may be much harder than we think.

We could also theorize that because the 1918 pandemic happened during an economic lull, the decisions taken by governments to close down economic activities may not have had that big of an impact as it would now, where people have been working more than ever. Our economic growth is unfortunately substantiated by technological bubbles that are every day more fragile. A single grain of sand could make this house of cards collapse. Governments respond the same way they did in 2008 and 2012 by recurring to monetary policy to avoid these bubbles bursting. A measure that may very well be inefficient. This is exactly the paradox that we are living in: the difference between today and 1918 is that there is no immediate economic chaos but a slow inexorable decline.

The same way behavioral contagion can bring disastrous consequences, it can also be a vehicle for positive changes. We need to promote these good examples, with explicit requests, practice and exemplification. We need to all recognize our interdependence on one another, that no one can save themselves on their own. If there is one thing that this pandemic is telling us, it is, that none of us are actually that far from each other.

Sofia Wolfson
Emory University
University of Miami