I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That (7 page)

Does the belief that such problems have a biological cause really help to reduce stigma?

In 2001,
Read and Harre
explored attitudes among first-year undergraduate psychology students, with questionnaires designed to probe their beliefs about the causes of mental health problems, and responses on six-point scales to statements like ‘I would be less likely to become romantically involved with someone if I knew they had spent time in a psychiatric hospital.’ People who believed more in a biological or genetic cause were more likely to believe that people with mental health problems are unpredictable and dangerous, more likely to fear them, and more likely to avoid interacting with them. An earlier study in 1999 by
Read and Law
had similar results.

In 2002
Walker and Read
showed young adults a video portraying a man with psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, then gave them either biogenetic or psychosocial explanations. Yet again, the ‘medical model’ approach significantly increased perceptions of dangerousness and unpredictability.

In 2004
Dietrich and colleagues
conducted a huge series of structured interviews with three representative population samples in Germany, Russia and Mongolia. Endorsing biological factors as the root cause for schizophrenia was associated with a greater desire for social distance.

And lastly, more compelling than any individual study, a
review of the literature to date
in 2006 found that overall, biogenetic causal theories, and labelling something as an ‘illness’, are both positively related to perceptions of dangerousness and unpredictability, and to fear and desire for social distance. They identified nineteen studies addressing the question. Eighteen found that belief in a genetic or biological cause was associated with more negative attitudes to people with mental health problems. Just one found the opposite, that belief in a genetic or biological cause was associated with more positive attitudes.

These findings are at odds with everything that many people who campaign against stigma have assumed for many years, but they’re not entirely nonsensical. As Jo Phelan explains in her paper ‘
Genetic Bases of Mental Illness
– a Cure for Stigma?’, a story about genetic causes may lead to people being conceived of as ‘defective’ or ‘physically distinct’. It can create an ‘associative stigma’ for the whole family, who in turn receive new labels such as ‘at risk’ or ‘carrier’. What’s more, this stigma may persist long after the ADHD symptoms have receded in adulthood: perhaps a partner will wonder, ‘Do I really want to risk having a child with this person, given their genetic predisposition?’

Perhaps it will go further than that: your children, before they even begin to show any signs of inattentiveness or hyperactivity, will experience a kind of anticipatory stigma. Do they have this condition, just like their father? ‘It’s genetic, you know.’ Perhaps the threshold for attaining a diagnosis of ADHD will be lower for your children: it’s a condition, like many others, after all, with a notably flexible diagnostic boundary.

Blaming parents is clearly vile. But before reading this research I think I also assumed, unthinkingly, like many people, that a ‘biological cause’ story about mental health problems was inherently valuable for combating stigma. Now I’m not so sure. People who want to combat prejudice may need to challenge their own prejudices too.

Pink, Pink, Pink, Pink.
Pink Moan

Guardian
, 25 August 2007

I want you to know that I love evolutionary psychologists, because their ideas – like ‘Girls prefer pink because they need to be better at hunting berries’ – are so much fun. Sure, there are problems. For example: we don’t know a lot about life in the Pleistocene period through which humans evolved; their claims sound a bit like ‘just so’ stories, relying on their own internal, circular logic; the existing evidence for genetic influence on behaviour, emotion and cognition is coarse; they only pick the behaviours which they think they can explain, while leaving the rest; and they get themselves in massive trouble as soon as they go beyond examining broad categories of human behaviours across societies and cultures, becoming crassly ethnocentric. But that doesn’t stop me
enjoying
their ideas.

This week
every single newspaper in the world
lapped up the story that scientists have cracked the pink problem. ‘At last, science discovers why blue is for boys but girls really do prefer pink,’
said
The Times
. And so on.

The study
¹
took 208
people in their twenties and asked them to choose their favourite colours between two options, repeatedly, and then graphed their overall preferences. It found overlapping curves, with a significant tendency for men to prefer blue, and female subjects showing a preference for redder, pinker tones. This, the authors speculated (to international excitement and approval), may be because men go out hunting, but women need to be good at interpreting flushed emotional faces, and identifying berries whilst out gathering.

Now, there are some serious problems here. Firstly, the test wasn’t measuring discriminative ability, just preference. I am yet to be given evidence that my girlfriend has the upper hand in discriminating shades of red as we gambol foraging for the fruits of the forest (which we do).

But is colour preference cultural or genetic? Well. The ‘girls preferring pink’ thing is not set in stone, and in fact there are good reasons to suspect it is culturally determined. I have always been led to believe by my father – the toughest man in the world – that pink is the correct colour for men’s shirts. In fact, until very recently blue was actively considered soft and girly, while boys wore pink, a tempered form of fierce, dramatic red.

There is no reason why you should take my word for this. Back in the days when ladies had a home journal (in 1918) the
Ladies Home Journal
wrote: ‘There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.’

The
Sunday Sentinel
in 1914 told American mothers: ‘If you like the color note on the little one’s garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.’ Some sources suggest it wasn’t until the 1940s that the modern gender associations of girly pink became widely accepted. Pink is, therefore, perhaps not biologically girly. Boys who were raised in pink frilly dresses went down mines and fought in World War II. Clothing conventions do change over time.

But within this study, was the preference stable across cultures? Well, no, not even in this experiment, where they had some Chinese test subjects too. For these participants, not only were the differences in the overlapping curves not so extreme, but the favourite colours were a kind of red for boys and a bit pinker for girls (not blue); and they had more of a red preference overall. Red, you see, is a lucky colour in contemporary Chinese culture.

Also snuggled away in the paper was the information that femininity scores on the
Bem Sex Role Inventory
correlated significantly with colour preference. Now, the BSRI is a joy from the 1970s, a self-rated test explicitly designed to measure how much you adhere to socially desirable, stereotypically masculine and feminine personality characteristics.

Anyone can take this test online
, for free: you simply mark on a score sheet from one to seven how much you feel you suit words like ‘theatrical’, ‘assertive’, ‘sympathetic’, ‘adaptable’ or ‘tactful’; and then your score is totted up at the end. So, it turns out that women who describe themselves as ‘yielding’, ‘cheerful’, ‘gullible’, ‘feminine’ and ‘do not use harsh language’ also prefer pink. Thanks for the warning: I’ll try to use this to avoid them in future.

It’s worth being critical and thoughtful about these stories; not because it’s fun to be mean, but because that’s what the authors would want, and also because stories about genes and culture are an important part of the stories we tell ourselves about who and what we are, our sense of personal responsibility, and the inevitability in our gender roles.

STATISTICS

Guns Don’t Kill People
, Puppies Do

Guardian
, 13 February 2010

Often one data point isn’t enough to spot a pattern – or even to say that an event is interesting and exceptional – because numbers are all about context and constraints. At one end there are the simple examples. ‘Mum Beats Odds of 50 Million-to-One to Have
3 Babies on Same Date
’ was the headline for the
Daily Express
on Thursday. If that phenomenon was really so unlikely, then since there are fewer than a million births a year in the UK, this would genuinely be a very rare event.

The
Express
’s number is calculated as 365 × 365 × 365 = 48,627,125. But in fact it’s out by an order of magnitude. One in 50 million would be the odds against someone having three siblings who share one particular
prespecified
birth date, which the editors of the
Daily Express
had sealed in an envelope and given to a lawyer fifty years ago. In reality there is no constraint on which day the
first
baby gets born on, so after that, we’re just interested in the odds of two more babies sharing that same birthday, which are 365 × 365 = 133,225 to one. And those odds might even be a bit lower: if you two feel friskier in winter, for example, your babies might tend to be born in the autumn.

Then there is the context. Living on your street, hanging out with the people from work, it’s easy to miss the sheer scale of humanity on the planet. In England and Wales there were
725,440 births
last year. From the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Statistical Bulletin
‘Who is Having Babies’
, 14 per cent of these were third births, and another 9 per cent were fourth or subsequent births. So there are 102,000 third children born a year, 167,000 third or more-th children, and if we include the rest of the Kingdom there are even more. All of which means that on average – since the odds of three shared birthdays is about 133,225 to one, and there are 167,000 third births a year in England – this specific birthday coincidence will occur about once or twice a year in the UK. To be written about in the
Express
it would also need to be a birth within a marriage, which gives us 55,000 chances a year, or once every two years.

When you forget about numerical constraints, all kinds of things can start to look spooky: in a group of twenty-three people, there is a 50 per cent chance that two of them will share a birthday, because any pair of birthdays on any date is acceptable. When you forget about numerical context, things can look weird too: if Uri Geller gets a nation in front of the telly to tap their broken watches against the screen, and ring the call centre if the watch starts ticking again, then with viewing figures of a few million there will be more excited calls than the switchboard can handle.

If you turned to your friend and said, ‘You know, a lot of funny things have happened to me, quite unexpectedly, over the course of a lifetime, but let me take a moment to specify right now the one thing that would seriously freak me out, over the next twelve hours, which would be if my dog trod on the trigger of my gun, and accidentally shot me in the face,’ and then your dog shot you in the calf, that would be weird. So
‘Dog Shoots Man’
was a big story in America this week, to the delight of headline writers. But here’s
‘Dog Shoots Man in the Back’
from Memphis in 2007,
another in Iowa
only two months later, and my own personal favourite: ‘
Puppy Shoots Man
: Dog Put Paw on Gun’s Trigger as Owner Tried to Kill Him’.