According to Scott Slovic, there is “a new
kind of power to appreciate what’s happening in our heads” and that statement
couldn’t be more true. Our minds are a powerful thing, and being able to
understand them better can help us become more self aware and develop a
stronger ability to interpret the world around us. In Numbers and Nerves, Scott
Slovic and his father Paul Slovic write about psychological concepts and how
they can empower us. This week Scott Slovic talks to us about how Numbers and
Nerves came to be and what he would like authors and readers to take away from
the book. Next week Paul Slovic will talk about the human mind, psychic numbing,
and desensitization.
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We’ve been working on the concept of Numbers
and Nerves for so many years now—certainly more than a decade—that it’s
difficult even to recall the precise origins. I believe this project percolated
naturally during our conversations while running together in Eugene and central
Oregon and during occasional meetings in other parts of the world. We’ve come
to realize that there are profound intersections between the work social
scientists have been doing to understand human sensitivity and insensitivity to
certain kinds of information and the intuitive appreciation of these mental
processes demonstrated by professional communicators—artists and writers of
various kinds.
Maybe the basic idea underlying this book is
that we can achieve some control over how our minds react to information by
understanding the psychological responses we all experience. Even simply having
terms like “psychic numbing,” “pseudoinefficacy,” “the prominence effect,” “the
asymmetry of trust,” “the anesthesia of destruction,” and “the trans-scalar
imaginary” gives us a new kind of power to appreciate what's happening in our
heads when information is presented to us. One of the insights of Numbers and
Nerves is that we think best when we’re able to use various modes of thought
together, what psychologists sometimes call “the dance of reason and affect.”
I’ve approached this book project as a
literary scholar and writer who’s worked for many years in the field called
“literature and environment.” My father, Paul, is a very active researcher in
such fields as risk perception and judgment and decision making. I grew up
having discussions with him and the rest of our family about his new
discoveries. Our dinner table conversations in Eugene used to revolve around
psychology, social and environmental issues, sports, and what my brothers and
sister and I were doing in school.
In a sense, I’ve spent most of my life
thinking about psychological concepts, even though I decided years ago to
devote my professional life to the interdisciplinary environmental humanities.
Many of my research projects in the field of ecocriticism (ecological literary
criticism) have highlighted the psychological aspects of environmental
writing—this is true, for instance, of my first book, Seeking Awareness in
American Naure Writing (1992). When my father and I began talking about a
decade and a half ago about the psychological tendencies that impede human
processing of numerical information, this idea immediately struck a chord with
me—I realized how many of my literary colleagues have sensed this idea as well
and have addressed it explicitly or indirectly in their work. A number of these
writers—Homero and Betty Aridjis, Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Rick
Bass, Bill McKibben, Sandra Steingraber, and Vandana Shiva—have contributed to
Numbers and Nerves. Their work deeply reveals how the self-conscious discussion
of our psychological habits and limitations helps us to manage or control the
ways in which we receive and process information, how multifaceted “mosaics” of
information (different modes of presentation offered in tandem with each other)
enable readers to draw upon a variety of mental processes that facilitate
stronger sensitivity to “meaning,” and how the telescopic movement between
broad overviews and narrow, individualized stories accentuates our apprehension
of complex issues.
I think what I would especially like readers
to take away from this book are three things: first, simply having names to
attach to the psychological and communication concepts presented in this book
will empower all of us—authors and readers alike—to understand how our minds
struggle with information; second, the more we seek to understand these mental
processes and practice alternative cognitive habits (such as “the trans-scalar
imaginary” that artist Chris Jordan describes in the interview at the end of
the book), the better we’ll be able to achieve what Robert Ornstein and Paul
Ehrlich called “new mind,” meaning new ways of thinking to match the new world
we’ve created through technology; and third, the ideas in this book are not
mere abstractions—they are directly applicable to many of the most serious and
urgent social and environmental predicaments we face in the world today. This
is important stuff!
It has been such a pleasure to work on this
book with my father. He’s a great scholar, and he’s someone who really tries to
make a difference in the world through his research into the mysteries of the
human mind. He’s also a wonderful person—very generous and adventurous, fun to
be around. Working on this book together, even as we’ve both juggled many other
writing deadlines and dizzying global travel schedules, has been something
we’ve loved doing. We’ve joked at times that we didn’t really want to finish
the book because we were having such a good time working on it together. But I
hope the publication of Numbers and Nerves will now give us something else to
do—presenting lectures on this topic. We gave our first lecture together about
a year ago, and we plan to lecture together at China’s Tsinghua University this
fall, shortly after the book is published. And who knows—perhaps we’ll also
dream up another book project to begin working on.