The full text

Hope

2006-09-20T23:36:00.000+10:00

Extract from "Jane Goodall Explores the Links Between Conservation and Human Health", Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 11 April 2005.

I wanted to share one last story [in her presentation]. It's about a chimpanzee who was born in Africa, whose mother was shot when he was about two years old, because there used to be a strong trade in live animals, and chimpanzees were taken from the wild by shooting the mother for entertainment and zoos and medical research and what have you.

He was shipped to a North American zoo where he was named Jo-Jo, and for about 15 years he lived by himself in a small old-fashioned zoo cage with a cement floor and iron bars. Then a new zoo director decided to build a large enclosure, and he bought 19 other chimps. The enclosure was surrounded by a moat filled with water because chimps don't swim.

Then one of the new young males decides to challenge the senior male. Well, the senior male is Jo-Jo. You have to learn how to behave from your society and Jo-Jo hadn't had the opportunity. He was so little when he was captured. So when this young male starts swaggering and bristling, and standing upright and hurling rocks, and looking very intimidating, Jo-Jo is absolutely terrified, and he runs into the water because he doesn't know anything about water either.

He manages in his fear to get over the barrier that is built to prevent the chimps from drowning in the deep water beyond. Three times he comes up gasping for breath, and then he is gone. On the other side of the moat is a little group of people, not many, because it was cold and wet. There was a keeper, who knew that Jo-Jo weighed 130 pounds and that male chimps are much stronger than us and can be dangerous, so he ran off to get a stick to try to pull Jo-Jo out of the water.

But luckily for Jo-Jo there was a man who visits the zoo one day a year with his wife and his three little girls, and he jumped in. In spite of a keeper grabbing onto him, saying that he would be killed, he pulled away. He had to swim under the water. He felt Jo-Jo's body, and he got this 130-pound dead weight over his shoulder. He managed to get over that barrier and he could feel small movements. Jo-Jo wasn't dead yet. And so he pushes him up onto the bank of the enclosure and then turns to re-join his slightly hysterical family.

Well, there was a woman there with a video camera, so you see and hear what happened next although the camera is all over the place because the woman did not even realize she was filming. The people on the banks suddenly start screaming at Rick to hurry back, that he is going to be killed, because they can see from their higher vantage points three of the big males coming down to see what all the commotion is about. At the same time, Jo-Jo is sliding back into the water because the bank is too steep.

This film, which is all over the place, suddenly steadies on Rick and you see him standing there. He's got one hand on that railing and you see him look up at his wife and children, and you see him looking up at these three males, and then you see him looking down at Jo-Jo, who is just going under the water again. For a moment he is motionless, and then he went back.

And again, he pushed Jo-Jo up and continued to push him, ignoring the approaching chimps, ignoring the screaming people. Jo-Jo is desperately struggling to grab onto something. Just in time, he gets hold of a thick tuft of grass, and with Rick pushing, manages to get onto the level ground. And just in time, Rick get back over that barrier.

That evening, that little piece of video was flashed across North America and the then-director of [Jane Goodall Institute] USA saw it. He called up Rick Swope and he said, "That was a very brave thing you did. You must have known it was dangerous. Everyone was telling you. What made you do it?" And Rick said, "Well, you see, I happened to look into his eyes, and it was like looking into the eyes of a man, and the message was, 'Won't anybody help me?'"

And you see, that is the message I have seen in the little chimps tied up in the marketplace that led to our sanctuaries. I've seen it looking out from the eyes of the chimps in the 5 foot-by-5 foot prisons of the medical research labs. I've seen it looking out from under the frills of the cruelly trained circus chimps, and the eyes of chained elephants, and dogs thrown out. I've seen it in the eyes of little children who have seen their parents killed in the ethnic violence in Africa. And in the eyes of kids caught up in street violence with nowhere to go.

If you see that look with your eyes, and you feel it in your heart, you have to jump in and try to help. Although the world today perhaps has more problems, more danger than ever before, I do believe it's true that there are more people, more little NGOs and special interest groups, more than ever before. Everywhere we have one of these problems, there is sure to be a group of people, or even one person giving so much, to try and put that problem right. And that is where I feel hope.

Care of the Soul: excerpts

2006-07-29T22:26:00.000+10:00

Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992, ISBN: 0060165979, pp.xi-20.

From Introduction

p.xi
The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all of our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is "loss of soul." When soul is neglected, it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning. Our temptation is to isolate these symptoms or to try to eradicate them one by one; but the root problem is that we have lost our wisdom about the soul, even our interest in it. We have today few specialists of the soul to advise us when we succumb to moods and emotional pain, or when as a nation we find ourselves confronting a host of threatening evils. But within our history we do have remarkable sources of insight from people who wrote explicitly about the nature and needs of the soul, and so we can look to the past for guidance in restoring this wisdom. In this book I will draw on that past wisdom, taking into account how we live now, to show that by caring for the soul we can find relief from our distress and discover deep satisfaction and pleasure.

It is impossible to define precisely what the soul is. Definition is an intellectual enterprise anyway; the soul prefers to imagine. We know intuitively that soul has to do with genuineness and depth, as when we say certain music has soul or a remarkable person is soulful. When you look closely at the image of soulfulness, you see that it is tied to life in all its particulars - good food, satisfying conversation, genuine friends, and experiences that stay in the memory and touch the heart. Soul is revealed in attachment, love, and com-...
p.xii
...munity, as well as in retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy.

Modern psychologies and therapies often contain an unspoken but clear salvational tone. If you could only learn to be assertive, loving, angry, expressive, contemplative, or thin, they imply, your troubles would be over. The self-help book of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, which in some fashion I'm taking as a model, was cherished and revered, but was never great art and didn't promise the sky. It gave recipes for good living and offered suggestions for a practical, down-to-earth philosophy of life. I'm interested in this humbler approach, one that is more accepting of human foibles, and indeed sees dignity and peace as emerging more from that acceptance than from any method of transcending the human condition. Therefore, this book, my own imagination of what a self-help manual could be, is a guide offering a philosophy of soulful living and techniques for dealing with everyday problems without striving for perfection or salvation.
[...]
Jung, one of our most recent doctors of the soul, said that every psychological problem is ultimately a matter of religion. Thus, this book contains both psychological advice and spiritual guidance. A spiritual life of some kind is absolutely necessary for psychological "health"; at the same time, excessive or ungrounded spirituality can also be dangerous, leading to all...
p.xiii
...kinds of compulsive and even violent behavior.
[...]
Tradition teaches that soul lies midway between understanding and unconsciousness, and that its instrument is neither the mind nor the body, but imagination. I understand therapy as nothing more than bringing imagination to areas that are devoid of it, which then must express themselves by becoming symptomatic.

p.xv
You can see already that care of the soul is quite different in scope from most modern notions of psychology and psychotherapy. It isn't about curing, fixing, changing, adjusting or making healthy, and it isn't about some idea of perfection or even improvement. It doesn't look to the future for an ideal, trouble-free existence. Rather, it remains patiently in the present, close to life as it presents itself day by day, and yet at the same time mindful of religion and spirituality.
[...]
In the modern world we separate religion and psychology, spiritual practice and therapy. There is considerable interest in healing this split, but if it is going to be bridged, our very idea of what we are doing in our psychology has to be radically re-imagined. Psychology and spirituality need to be seen as one. In my view, this new paradigm suggests the end of psychology as we have known it altogether because it is essentially modern, secular, and ego-centered. A new idea, a new language, and new traditions must be developed on which to base our theory and practice.

p.xvi
Care of the soul speaks to the longings we feel and to the symptoms that drive us crazy, but it is not a path away from shadow or death. A soulful personality is complicated, multifaceted, and...
p.xvii
...shaped by both pain and pleasure, success and failure. Life lived soulfully is not without its moments of darkness and periods of foolishness. Dropping the salvational fantasy frees us up to the possibility of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, which are the very foundation of soul.

p.xviii
Soul is nothing like ego. Soul is closely connected to fate, and the turns of fate almost always go counter to the expectations and often to the desires of the ego. Even the Jungian idea of Self, carefully defined as a blend of conscious understanding and unconscious influences, is still very personal and too human in contrast to the idea of soul. Soul is the font of who we are, and yet it is far beyond our capacity to devise and to control. We can cultivate, tend, enjoy, and participate in the things of the soul, but we can't outwit it or manage it or shape it to the designs of a willful ego.

p.xix
The act of entering into the mysteries of the soul, without sentimentality or pessimism, encourages life to blossom forth according to its own designs and with its own unpredictable beauty. Care of the soul is not solving the puzzle of life; quite the opposite, it is an appreciation of the paradoxical mysteries that blend light and darkness into the grandeur of what human life and culture can be.
[...]
As you read this book, it might be a good idea to abandon any ideas you may have about living successfully and properly, and about understanding yourself. The human soul is not meant to be understood. Rather, you might take a more relaxed position and reflect on the way your life has taken shape.
[...]
Let us imagine care of the soul, then, as an application of poetics to everyday life.

From Chapter 1: Honoring Symptoms as a Voice of the Soul

p.18
A major difference between care and cure is that cure implies the end of trouble. If you are cured, you don't have...
p.19
...to worry about whatever was bothering you any longer. But care has a sense of ongoing attention. There is no end. Conflicts may never be fully resolved. Your character will never change radically, although it may go through some interesting transformations. Awareness can change, of course, but problems may persist and never go away.
[...]
Ancient psychology, rooted in a very different ground from modern therapeutic thinking, held that the fate and character of each of us is born in mystery, that our individuality is so profound and so hidden that it takes more than a lifetime for identity to emerge. Renaissance doctors said that the essence of each person originates as a star in the heavens. How different this is from the modern view that a person is what he makes himself to be.

Care of the soul, looking back with special regard to ancient psychologies for insight and guidance, goes beyond the secular mythology of the self and recovers a sense of the sacredness of each individual life. This sacred quality is not just value - all lives are important. It is the unfathomable mystery that is the very seed and heart of each individual. Shallow therapeutic manipulations aimed at restoring normality or tuning a life according to stan-...
p.20
...dards reduces - shrinks - that profound mystery to the pale dimensions of a social common denominator referred to as the adjusted personality. Care of the soul sees another reality altogether. It appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. It sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel. The uniqueness of a person is made up of the insane and the twisted as much as it is of the rational and normal. To approach this paradoxical point of tension where adjustment and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of our mystery-filled, star-born nature.

Copyright 1992 by Thomas Moore. I apologise for so blatantly messing with Mr Moore's copyright; I'm doing it because I think these ideas are important and interesting, and you should be able to read them whether or not you can buy/borrow the book.

Care of the Soul: Gifts of Depression

2006-07-23T20:22:00.000+10:00

"Chapter 7: Gifts of Depression," in Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992, ISBN: 0060165979, pp. 137-154.

p.137
The soul presents itself in a variety of colors, including all the shades of gray, blue, and black. To care for the soul, we must observe the full range of all its colorings, and resist the temptation to approve only of white, red, and orange - the brilliant colors. The "bright" idea of colorizing old black and white movies is consistent with our culture's general rejection of the dark and the gray. In a society that is defended against the tragic sense of life, depression will appear as an enemy, an unredeemable malady; yet in such a society, devoted to light, depression, in compensation, will be unusually strong.

Care of the soul requires our appreciation of these ways it presents itself. Faced with depression, we might ask ourselves, "What is it doing here? Does it have some necessary role to play?" Especially in dealing with depression, a mood close to our feelings of mortality, we must guard against the denial of death that is so easy to slip into. Even further, we may have to develop a taste for the depressed mood, a positive respect for its place in the soul's cycles.

Some feelings and thoughts seem to emerge only in a dark mood. Suppress the mood, and you will suppress those ideas and...
p.138
...reflections. Depression may be as important a channel for valuable "negative" feelings, as expressions of affection are for the emotions of love. Feelings of love give birth naturally to gestures of attachment. In the same way, the void and grayness of depression evoke an awareness and articulation of thoughts otherwise hidden behind the screen of lighter moods. Sometimes a person will come to a therapy session in a dark mood. "I shouldn't have come today," he will say. "I'll feel better next week, and we can get on with it." But I'm happy that he came, because together we will hear thoughts and feel his soul in a way not possible in his cheerful moods. Melancholy gives the soul an opportunity to express a side of its nature that is as valid as any other, but is hidden out of our distaste for its darkness and bitterness.

Saturn's Child

Today we seem to prefer the word depression over sadness and melancholy. Perhaps its Latin form sounds more clinical and serious. But there was a time, five or six hundred years ago, when melancholy was identified with the Roman god Saturn. To be depressed was to be "in Saturn," and a person chronically disposed to melancholy was known as a "child of Saturn." Since depression was identified with the God and the planet named for him, it was associated with other qualities of Saturn. For example, he was known as the "old man," who presided over the golden age. Whenever we talk about the "golden years" or the "good old days," we are calling up this god, who is the patron of the past. The depressed person sometimes thinks that the good times are all past, that there is nothing left for the present or the future. These melancholic thoughts are deeply rooted in Saturn's preference for days gone by, for memory and the sense that time is passing. These thoughts and feelings, sad as they are, favor the soul's...
p.139
...desire to be both in time and in eternity, and so in a strange way they can be pleasing.

Sometimes we associate depression with literal aging, but it is more precisely a matter of the soul's aging. Saturn not only brings an affection for the "good old days," he also raises the more substantive idea that life is moving on: we're getting old, experienced, and maybe even wise. A person even in his middle or late thirties will be in conversation and offhandedly recall something that happened twenty years ago. He will stop, shocked. "I've never said that before! Twenty years ago. I'm getting old." This is Saturn's gift of age and experience. Having been identified with youth, the soul now takes on important qualities of age that are positive and helpful. If age is denied, soul becomes lost in an inappropriate clinging to youth.

Depression grants the gift of experience not as a literal fact but as an attitude toward yourself. You get a sense of having lived through something, of being older and wiser. You know that life is suffering, and that knowledge makes a difference. You can't enjoy the bouncy, carefree innocence of youth any longer, a realization that entails both sadness because of the loss, and pleasure in a new feeling of self-acceptance and self-knowledge. This awareness of age has a halo of melancholy around it, but it also enjoys a measure of nobility.

Naturally, there is resistance to this incursion of Saturn that we call depression. It's difficult to let go of youth, because that release requires an acknowledgment of death. I suspect that those of us who opt for eternal youth are setting ourselves up for heavy bouts of depression. We're inviting Saturn to make a house call when we try to delay our service to him. Then Saturn's depression will give its color, depth, and substance to the soul that for one reason or another has dallied long with youth. Saturn weathers and ages a person naturally, the way temperature, winds, and time weather a barn. In Saturn, reflection deepens, thoughts embrace a larger...
p.140
...sense of time, and the events of a long lifetime get distilled into a sense of one's essential nature.

In traditional texts, Saturn is characterized as cold and distant, but he has other attributes as well. Medical books called him the god of wisdom and philosophical reflection. In a letter to Giovanni Cavalcanti, a successful statesman and poet, [Marsilio] Ficino refers to Saturn as a "unique and divine gift." In the late fifteenth century, Ficino wrote a book warning scholars and studious people in particular to take care not to invite too much Saturn into their souls; because of their sedentary occupations, scholars can easily become severely depressed, he said, and have to find ways to counter their dark moods. But another book could be written about the dangers of living without study and speculation, and without reflecting on our lives. Saturn's moods may be dangerous because of their darkness, but his contributions to the economy of the soul are indispensable. If you allow his depression to visit, you will feel the change in your body, in your muscles, and on your face - some relief from the burden of youthful enthusiasm and the "unbearable lightness of being."

Maybe we could appreciate the role of depression in the economy of the soul more if we could only take away the negative connotations of the word. What if "depression" were simply a state of being, neither good nor bad, something the soul does in its own good time and for its own good reasons? What if it were simply one of the planets that circle the sun? One advantage of using the traditional image of Saturn, in place of the clinical term depression, is that then we might see melancholy more as a valid way of being rather than as a problem that needs to be eradicated.

Aging brings out the flavors of a personality. The individual emerges over time, the way fruit matures and ripens. In the Renaissance view, depression, aging, and individuality all go together: the sadness of growing old is part of becoming an individual. Melan-...
p.141
...choly thoughts carve out an interior space where wisdom can take up residence.

Saturn was also traditionally identified with the metal lead, giving the soul weight and density, allowing the light, airy elements to coalesce. In this sense, depression is a process that fosters a valuable coagulation of thoughts and emotions. As we age, our ideas, formerly light, rambling, and unrelated to each other, become more densely gathered into values and a philosophy, giving our lives substance and firmness.

Because of its painful emptiness, it is often tempting to look for a way out of depression. But entering into its mood and thoughts can be deeply satisfying. Depression is sometimes described as a condition in which there are no ideas - nothing to hang on to. But maybe we have to broaden our vision and see that feelings of emptiness, the loss of familiar understandings and structures in life, and the vanishing of enthusiasm, even though they seem negative, are elements that can be appropriated and used to give life fresh imagination.

When, as counselors and friends, we are the observers of depression and are challenged to find a way to deal with it in others, we could abandon the monotheistic notion that life always has to be cheerful, and be instructed by melancholy. We could learn from its qualities and follow its lead, becoming more patient in its presence, lowering our excited expectations, taking a watchful attitude as this soul deals with its fate in utter seriousness and heaviness. In our friendship, we could offer it a place of acceptance and containment. Sometimes, of course, depression, like any emotion, can go beyond ordinary limits, becoming a completely debilitating illness. But in extreme cases, too, even in the midst of strong treatments, we can still look for Saturn at the core of depression and find ways to befriend it.

One great anxiety associated with depression is that it will never...
p.142
...end, that life will never again be joyful and active. This is one of the feelings that is part of the pattern - the sense of being trapped, forever to be held in the remote haunts of Saturn. In my practice, when I hear this fear I think of it as Saturn's style, as one of the ways he works the soul - by making it feel constrained, with nowhere to go. Traditionally, there is a binding theme in saturnine moods. This anxiety seems to decrease when we stop fighting the saturnine elements that are in the depression, and turn instead toward learning from depression and taking on some of its dark qualities as aspects of personality.

Insinuations of Death

Saturn is also the reaper, god of the harvest, patron of end-time and its festival, the Saturnalia; accordingly, imagery of death may permeate periods of depression. People of all ages sometimes say from their depression that life is over, that their hopes for the future have proved unfounded. They are disillusioned because the values and understandings by which they have lived for years suddenly make no sense. Cherished truths sink into Saturn's black earth like chaff at harvest time.

Care of the soul requires acceptance of all this dying. The temptation is to champion our familiar ideas about life right up to the last second, but it may be necessary in the end to give them up, to enter into the movement of death. If the symptom is felt as the sense that life is over, and that there's no use in going on, then an affirmative approach to this feeling might be a conscious, artful giving-in to the emotions and thoughts of ending that depression has stirred up. Nicholas of Cusa, certainly one of the most profound theologians of the Renaissance, tells how he was on a journey, on a ship in fact, when the realization dawned on him in a visionary way that we should acknowledge our ignorance of the most profound...
p.143
...things. Discovering that we do not know who God is and what life is all about, he says, is the learning of ignorance, ignorance about the very meaning and value of our lives. This is a starting point for a more grounded, open-ended kind of knowledge that never closes up in fixed opinions. Using his favorite metaphors from geometry, he says that if full knowledge about the very base of our existence could be described as a circle, the best we can do is to arrive at a polygon - something short of sure knowledge.

The emptiness and dissolution of meaning that are often present in depression show how attached we can become to our ways of understanding and explaining our lives. Often our personal philosophies and our values seem to be all too neatly wrapped, leaving little room for mystery. Depression comes along then and opens up a hole. Ancient astrologers imagined Saturn as the most remote planet, far out in cold and empty space. Depression makes holes in our theories and assumptions, but even this painful process can be honored as a necessary and valuable source of healing.

This saturnine truth is evoked by Oscar Wilde, who, for all his emphasis on fullness of style as a central concern of life, knew the importance of emptying. From the prison cell where he was being punished for his love of a man, he wrote his extraordinary letter, "De Profundis," in which he remarks: "The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?" We may have to learn this truth, as Cusa did, that we cannot calculate (notice the mathematical image) the orbit of our own soul. This peculiar kind of education - learning our limits - may not be a conscious effort only; it may come upon us as a captivating mood of depression, at least momentarily wiping out our happiness, and sending us off into fundamental appraisals of our knowledge, our assumptions, and the very purposes of our existence.

In the ancient texts Saturn was sometimes labeled "poisonous."
p.144
In recommending some positive effects in saturnine moods, I don't want to overlook the terrible pain that they can bring. Nor is it only minor forms of melancholy that offer unique gifts to the soul; long, deep bouts of acute depression can also clear out and restructure the tenets by which life has been lived. The "children of Saturn" traditionally included carpenters, shown in drawings putting together the foundations and skeletons of new houses. In our melancholy, inner construction may be taking place, clearing out the old and putting up the new. Dreams, in fact, often depict construction sites and buildings just going up, suggesting again that the soul is made: it is the product of work and inventive effort. Freud pointed out that during bouts of melancholy the outer life may look empty, but at the same time inner work may be taking place at full speed.

Coming to Terms with Depression

In Jungian language, Saturn may be considered an animus figure. The animus is a deep part of the psyche that roots ideas and abstraction in the soul. Many people are strong in anima - full of imagination, close to life, empathic, and connected to people around them. But these very people may have difficulty moving far enough away from emotional involvement to see what is going on, and to relate their life experiences to their ideas and values. Their experience is "wet," to use another ancient metaphor for the soul, because they are so emotionally involved in life, and so they might benefit from an excursion to the far-off regions of cold, dry Saturn.

This dryness can separate awareness from the moist emotions that are characteristic of close involvement with life. We see this development in old people as they reflect on their past with some distance and detachment. Saturn's point of view, in fact, can some-...
p.145
...times be rather hardhearted and even cruel. In Samuel Beckett's melancholy play Krapp's Last Tape, we find a humorous, biting depiction of saturnine reflection. Using a tape recorder, Krapp plays back tapes he has made throughout his life, and listens with considerable gloom to his voices from the past. After one of the tapes, he sits down to make another: "Just listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that's all done with anyway."

These few lines reveal a distance between past and present, as well as a cooler perspective and a deconstruction of values. In most of Beckett's plays we hear characters express their depression and hopelessness, their inability to find any shreds of former meaning; yet they also offer an image of the noble foolishness that is part of a life so riddled with emptiness. In the absolute sadness of these characters, we can grasp a mystery about the human condition. It is not a literal aberration, although it may feel that way, to suddenly find meaning and value disappear, and to be overwhelmed with the need for withdrawal and with vague emotions of hopelessness. Such feelings have a place and work a kind of magic on the soul.

Krapp, whose name suggests depression's devaluation of human life, shows that cold remorse and self-judgment do not have to be seen as clinical syndromes, but as a necessary foolishness in human life that actually accomplishes something for the soul. Professional psychology might try to correct Krapp's self-criticism as a form of neurotic masochism, but Beckettt shows that even in its ugliness and foolishness it makes a certain kind of sense.

Krapp playing his tapes and muttering his curses is also an image of ourselves turning our memories over in our minds again and again, in a process of distillation. Over time something essential emerges from this saturnine reduction - the gold in the sludge. Saturn was sometimes called sol niger, the black sun. In his darkness there is to be found a precious brilliance, our essential nature, distilled by depression as perhaps the greatest gift of melancholy.

p.146

If we persist in our modern way of treating depression as an illness to be cured only mechanically and chemically, we may lose the gifts of soul that only depression can provide. In particular, tradition taught that Saturn fixes, darkens, weights, and hardens whatever is in contact with it. If we do away with Saturn's moods, we may find it exhausting trying to keep life bright and warm at all costs. We may be even more overcome then by the increased melancholy called forth by the repression of Saturn, and lose the sharpness and substance of identity that Saturn gives the soul. In other words, symptoms of a loss of Saturn might include a vague sense of identity, the failure to take one's own life seriously, and a general malaise or ennui that is a pale reflection of Saturn's deep, dark moods.

Saturn locates identity deeply in the soul, rather than on the surface of personality. Identity is felt as one's soul finding its weight and measure. We know who we are because we have uncovered the stuff of which we are made. It has been sifted out by depressive thought, "reduced," in the chemical sense, to essence. Months or years focused on death have left a white ghostly residue that is the "I," dry and essential.

Care of the soul asks for a cultivation of the larger world depression represents. When we speak clinically of depression, we think of an emotional or behavioral condition, but when we imagine depression as a visitation by Saturn, then many qualities of his world come into view: the need for isolation, the coagulation of fantasy, the distilling of memory, and accommodation with death, to name only a few.

For the soul, depression is an initiation, a rite of passage. If we think that depression, so empty and dull, is void of imagination, we may overlook its initiatory aspects. We may be imagining imagination itself from a point of view foreign to Saturn; emptiness can be rife with feeling-tone, images of catharsis, and emotions of re-...
p.147
...gret and loss. As a shade of mood, gray can be as interesting and as variegated as it is in black-and-white photography.

If we pathologize depression, treating it as a syndrome in need of cure, then the emotions of Saturn have no place to go except into abnormal behavior and acting out. An alternative would be to invite Saturn in, when he comes knocking, and give him an appropriate place to stay. Some Renaissance gardens had a bower dedicated to Saturn - a dark, shaded, remote place where a person could retire and enter the persona of depression without fear of being disturbed. We could model our attitude and our ways of dealing with depression on this garden. Sometimes people need to withdraw and show their coldness. As friends and counselors, we could provide the emotional space for such feelings, without trying to change them or interpret them. And as a society, we could acknowledge Saturn in our buildings. A house or commercial building could have a room or an actual garden where a person could go to withdraw in order to meditate, think, or just be alone and sit. Modern architecture, when it tries to be cognizant of soul, seems to favor the circle or square where one joins community. But depression has a centrifugal force; it moves away from the center. We often refer to our buildings and institutions as "centers," but Saturn would probably prefer an outpost. Hospitals and schools often have "common rooms," but they could just as easily have "uncommon rooms," places for withdrawal and solitude.

Leaving a television running when no one is watching, or having a radio playing all day long may defend against Saturn's silence. We want to do away with the empty space surrounding that remote planet, but as we fill in those voids, we may be forcing him to assume the role of symptom, to be housed in our clinics and hospitals as a pest, rather than as a healer and teacher - his traditional roles.

Why is it that we fail to appreciate this facet of the soul? One reason is that most of what we know about Saturn comes to us symptomatically. Emptiness apears too late and too literally to have...
p.148
...soul in it. In our cities, boarded-up homes and failing businesses signal economic and social "depression." In these "depressed" areas of our cities, decay is cut off from will and conscious participation, appearing only as an external manifestation of a problem or an illness.

We also see depression, economically and emotionally, as literal failure and threat, as a surprise breaking in upon our healthier plans and expectations. What if we were to expect Saturn and his dark, empty spaces to have a place in life? What if we propitiated Saturn by incorporating his values into our way of life? (Propitiate means both to acknowledge and to offer respect as a means of protection.)

We could also honor Saturn by showing more honesty in the face of serious illness. Hospice workers will tell you how much a family can gain when the depressive facts of a terminal illness are discussed openly. We might also take our own illnesses, our visits to the doctor and to the hospital, as reminders of our mortality. We are not caring for the soul in these situations when we protect ourselves from their impact. It isn't necessary to be only saturnine in these situations, but a few honest words for the melancholy feelings involved might keep Saturn propitiated.

Because depression is one of the faces of the soul, acknowledging it and bringing it into our relationships fosters intimacy. If we deny or cover up anything that is at home in the soul, then we cannot be fully present to others. Hiding the dark places results in a loss of soul; speaking for them and from them offers a way toward genuine community and intimacy.

The Healing Powers of Depression

A few years ago, Bill, the priest I mentioned earlier [in the book, not in this chapter], came to me with a remarkable story. In his sixty-fifth year, thirty years into the priesthood, as a compassionate pastor of a ru-...
p.149
...ral church he had given what he thought was perfectly appropriate aid to two of his women parishioners. His bishop, however, thought he had mishandled church funds and used poor judgment in other respects, and so, after a lifetime of respect, he was given two days to pack and leave the diocese.

When he began talking to me about his situation, Bill was quite lively and interested in his experiences. He had taken to group therapy well, where in particular he had found ways to engage some of his anger. He even decided at one point to become a therapist himself, with the idea that he might be able to help his fellow priests. But when he talked about the trouble he had fallen into, he gave me explanations and excuses that seemed naive. About one woman he said, "I was only trying to help her. She needed me. If she hadn't needed my attentions, I wouldn't have given them to her."

I knew I had to look for a way to hold and contain all of Bill's unusual experiences and interpretations without judging them. We spent a great deal of time with his dreams, and quickly he became quite expert at reading their imagery. I also invited him to bring in paintings and drawings that he had been doing in his group therapy. Discussing these images week after week gave us some insight into his nature. By means of this artwork Bill also had a chance to look closely at his family background and some of the key events surrounding his decision to become a priest.

Then a curious thing happened. As the naive explanations for his behavior fell away to be replaced by more substantive thoughts about the larger themes in his life, the tone of his mood darkened. As he expressed more of his anger about the way he had been treated throughout his life as a seminarian and priest, he lost much of his lightness. Meanwhile, he had moved into a home for priests, where he was largely withdrawn. He embraced his solitude and decided not to participate in activities in the home, and gradually, the wounds of his recent experiences deepened into genuine depression.

Now, Bill spoke critically of the church authorities and talked...
p.150
...more realistically about his father, who had tried to become a priest and had failed. To some extent Bill thought that he was not cut out by nature to be a priest, that he had taken his father's place, trying to fulfill his father's dreams and not his own.

Bill trusted his depression enough to allow it a central place in his life. In true depressive style he would start every conversation saying: "It's no use. It's all over. I'm too old to have what I want in my life. I made mistakes all along the way, but I can't do anything about it now. All I want to do is stay in my room and read." But he remained in therapy, and every week he spoke from and about his depression.

My therapeutic strategy, if you can call it that, was simply to bring an attitude of acceptance and interest to Bill's depression. I didn't have any clever techniques. I didn't urge him to attend workshops on depression or try guided fantasies to contact the depressed person within. Care of the soul is less heroic than that. I simply tried to appreciate the way his soul was expressing itself at the moment. I observed the slow, subtle shifts in tone and focus that Bill brought in his manner, his words, his dreams, and the imagery of his conversation.

In his depression, when Bill said that he should never have been a priest, I didn't take that statement literally, because I knew how much his priesthood had meant to Bill over the years. But now he was discovering the shadow in his calling. His life as a priest was being deepened, given soul, by new reflection on its limitations. Bill was having to face for the first time the sacrifices he had made in order to be a priest. This was not an absolute disavowal of his priesthood; it was a completion. I noticed that even as he uncovered piece after piece of the sacrifices he had made, and even as he felt intense regret for having become a priest, at the same time he spoke of his loyalty to the church, his continuing interest in theology, and his concern for death and afterlife. In some ways, he was only now discovering the real core of his priesthood. The docile, compul-...
p.151
...sively helpful priest was dying off, to be replaced by a stronger, more individual, less manipulated man.

From his depressed state, Bill could only see the dying, the ending of a familiar life and the emptying out of long-held values and understandings. But the depression was clearly correcting his naivete. For most people, their cardinal virtue is also their pivotal fault. Bill's childlike concern for all beings animal, vegetable, and human gave him his compassion and altruistic sensibilities. But his vulnerability also made him the butt of jokes among his fellow priests, who never realized how much he suffered from their teasing. His generosity was unlimited and in a sense had destroyed him. But his depression strengthened him, giving him new firmness and solidity.

By means of his depression, Bill was also better able to see the villains in his life. Previously his naive point of view gave everyone in his experience bland approval. There were neither real heroes nor full-bodied enemies. But in his depression Bill began to feel things much more deeply, and his hostility toward his colleagues came out of him with real grit. "I hope they all die young," he once uttered through his teeth.

Bill would tell me convincingly: "I'm old. Let's face it. I'm seventy. What's left for me? I hate young men. I'm happy when those young turks get sick. Don't tell me I have lots of life left. I don't."

Bill was strongly identified with being an old man. How could I argue with his telling me and himself to face facts and not deny his age? But I believed that this clever statement was a defense against considering other options for identification, and that, paradoxically, it served to keep Bill protected from the lower dimensions of his depression. By giving up at that particular moment, he didn't have to think the thoughts and experience the feelings that were waiting for him in the wings.

One day he told me a dream in which he was going down a steep flight of stairs, then down a second flight; but the latter were too...
p.152
...narrow for him and he didn't want to go any farther. Behind him the figure of a woman was urging him on, while he resisted. This was a picture of Bill's state at the time. He was well into a descent, but he was fighting against taking a deeper plunge.

Bill's complaint "I'm an old man; there's nothing left for me" was not really Saturn settling in. Although his statement sounds like an affirmation of age, it is more an attack on age. When he said this I wondered if he had been denied the opportunity to grow up during his many years as a seminarian and priest. He told me that in some ways he had felt like a child the whole time, never worrying about money or survival, never making life decisions, but simply following the orders of his superiors. Now fate had shoved him into a place of profound unsettling and reflection. For the first time he was questioning everything, and now he was growing up at an alarming speed.

"Your dream," I said to him, "about descending a narrow staircase with a woman urging you from behind - I think we might turn to Freud and see it as an attempt at birth."

"I never thought of it that way," he said, interested.

"You seem in your melancholy to be in a bardo state. Do you know what that is?"

"No," he said, "I never heard of it."

"The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes that time between incarnations, the period before the next birth into life, as bardo."

"I don't have any taste for the events of life these days."

"That's what I mean," I said. "You don't want to participate in life. You are between lives. The dream may be inviting you to descend into the canal."

"I feel very reluctant in that dream, and I'm disturbed by the woman."

"Aren't we all," I said, thinking how difficult it is to be born into this life again, especially when the first time around was so painful and apparently unsuccessful.

p.153

"I'm not ready," he said with understanding and conviction.

"That's all right," I responded. "You know where you are, and it's important to be exactly there. Bardo takes time; it can't be rushed. There's no point in premature birth."

Bill rose to leave and go back to his "cave," as he called his room in the monastery. "There's nothing else to do, is there?" he asked.

"I don't think so," I said, wishing I could give him some specific hope.

Bill had measured the steps of the moon in his theology classes, and he thought he knew what was good for the soul. But now, having learned from his depression, he was speaking a more solid truth. "I will never again tell another person how to live," he said. "I can only talk to them of their mystery." Like Oscar Wilde in his depression, Bill was finding a greater point of view, a new appreciation for mystery. You would think a priest would be the one person familiar with mystery, but Bill's depression could be seen as a further step in his education in theology.

Eventually Bill's depression lifted, and he took a position in a new city where he worked as both counselor and priest. His period of schooling in Saturn's truths had some effect. He was able to help people look honestly at their lives and their emotions, whereas at a former time he would have tried to talk them out of their dark feelings with purely positive encouragement. He also knew what it was like to be deprived of respect and security, and so he could understand better the discouragement and despair of many people who came to him with tragic stories.

Care of the soul doesn't mean wallowing in the symptom, but it does mean trying to learn from depression what qualities the soul needs. Even further, it attempts to weave those depressive qualities into the fabric of life so that the aesthetics of Saturn - coldness, isolation, darkness, emptiness - makes a contribution to the texture...
p.154
...of everyday life. In learning from depression, a person might dress in Saturn's black to mimic his mood. He might go on a trip alone as a response to a saturnine feeling. He might build a grotto in his yard as a place of saturnine retreat. Or, more internally, he might let his depressive thoughts and feelings just be. All of these actions would be a positive response to a visitation of Saturn's depressive emotion. They would be concrete ways to care for the soul in its darker beauty. In so doing, we might find a way into the mystery of this emptiness of the heart. We might also discover that depression has its own angel, a guiding spirit whose job it is to carry the soul away to its remote places where it finds unique insight and enjoys a special vision.

Hannah and her Sisters: an extract

2006-07-20T11:47:00.000+10:00

Woody Allen. Hannah and her Sisters. London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1988 [copyright Orion Pictures Corporation 1986] ISBN: 0571151175, pp. 168-173.

... the film cuts to an almost isolated path in Central Park, complete with old-fashioned streetlamps and scattered leaves. Holly and Mickey stroll into view, deep in conversation.

HOLLY (Gesturing) Gosh, you really went through a crisis, you know that? H-how did you get over it? I mean, when I ran into you, you seemed, you seemed just perfectly fine. Well, you seem fine now.

MICKEY: Well... (Chuckling) I'll tell you. (Sighing) One day about a month ago...
The film abruptly cuts to Mickey's flashback, a visual counterpoint to the story he is telling Holly. A close-up of a nervous, perspiring, and panting Mickey alone in his apartment appears on the screen as his voice is heard.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: ... I really hit bottom. You know, I just felt that in a Godless universe, I didn't want to go on living. Now I happen to own this rifle... (Coughing)
Mickey raises the barrel of a rifle to his forehead. He shuts his eyes tightly.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: ... which I loaded, believe it or not, and pressed it to my forehead. And I remember thinking, at the time, I'm gonna kill myself. Then I thought... what if I'm wrong? What if there is a God? I mean, after all, nobody really knows that.
The camera moves past the desperate Mickey to a mirror on the wall behind him. Its reflection shows his spiral staircase and some standing lamps. A clock faintly ticks.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: But then I thought, no. You know, maybe is not good enough. I want certainty or nothing. And I remember very clearly the clock was ticking, and I was sitting there frozen, with the gun to my head, debating whether to shoot.
The gun goes off with a loud bang. The mirror shatters.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: All of a sudden, the gun went off.
Mickey, holding the rifle, is seen running over to the shattered mirror. The sounds of his excited neighbors, their shouting, a knocking door, are heard as he continues his tale.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: I had been so tense, my finger had squeezed the trigger inadvertently...

NEIGHBOR #1 (Offscreen, overlapping): What's happening? Wh-wh-what's going on?

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER (Continuing): ... but I was perspiring so much, the gun had slid off my forehead and missed me.

NEIGHBOR #2 (Offscreen, overlapping): I don't know. I heard a gun. Is everything all right?
Mickey, still brandishing the rifle, runs into his sunlit living room. He looks around frantically, his shirt loose. Finally, he throws the rifle down between the sofa and the coffee table. The gun goes off a second time. Mickey, standing nearby, jumps, his hands flying to his head. The doorbell rings; the neighbors begin pounding at the door.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: And suddenly, neighbors were, were, pounding on the door, and-and I don't know, the whole scene was just pandemonium. And, uh, you know, and I-I-I-I-I ran to the door.
Mickey runs offscreen briefly to answer the door.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: I-I-I-I didn't know what to say. You know, I was, I was embarrassed and confused, and my-my-my mind was r-r-racing a mile a minute...
He returns onscreen, panting; he looks frantically once again around the living room.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: ...and I-I just knew one thing.
The film cuts to a West Side street. It's an overcast day. Mickey, walking slowly along the sidewalk, passes several other pedestrians and numerous storefronts, including Klein's Pharmacy and a "Bar-B-Q" take-out. Occasionally, he is obscured by a tree trunk on the opposite side of the street; a few taxis go by as he talks over the scene.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: I... I-I-I-I had to get out of that house. I had to just get out in the fresh air and-and clear my head. And I remember very clearly, I walked the streets. I walked and I walked. I-I didn't know what was going through my mind. It all seemed so violent and un-unreal to me. And I wandered...
The movie cuts to the exterior of the Metro movie theater, with its smoked glass entrance doors and its Art Deco feel. An old publicity photo hangs inside. Mickey's reflection is seen at the almost-transparent doors, as well as the reflection of the street and various cars whizzing by. His reflection walks towards the theater entrance; he continues his story.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: ...for a long time on the Upper West Side, you know, an-and it must have been hours! You know, my, my feet hurt. My head was, was pounding, and, and I had to sit down. I went into a movie house. I-I didn't know what was playing or anything.
Mickey walks into the movie house. He is seen through the glass doors, which still reflect the street and traffic outside. He makes his way through the lobby into the actual theater.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: I just, I just needed a moment to gather my thoughts and, and be logical, and, and put the world back into rational perspective.
The film abruptly cuts to the theater's black-and-white screen, where the Marx Brothers, in Duck Soup, play the helmets of several soldiers standing in a line like a live xylophone. The sounds of the "xylophone" are heard as the movie cuts to the darkened theater, where Mickey slowly sits down in the balcony seat. The "xylophone" music stops and changes to "Hidee-hidee-hidee-hidee-hidee-hidee-ho" as sung by the Marx Brothers and ensemble in the movie. The singing continues faintly in the background as Mickey continues his tale:

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: And I went upstairs to the balcony, and I sat down (Sighing) and, you know, the movie was a-a-a film that I'd seen many times in my life since I was a kid, an-and I always u-uh, loved it. And, you know, I'm, I'm watching these people up on the screen, and I started getting hooked o-on the film, you know?
The film cuts back to the black-and-white movie screen as Mickey continues to talk. The Marx Brothers, as well as the hundred-odd other cast members in Duck Soup, are kneeling and bowing as they sing "Hidee-hidee-ho." They kick their heels up in the air. They sway back and forth, hands clasped, singing "Oh-h-h-h-h-h..."

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: ...And I started to feel how can you even think of killing yourself? I mean, isn't it so stupid? I mean, l-look at all the people up there on the screen. You know, they're real funny, and, and what if the worst is true?
The movie cuts back to Mickey, sitting almost obscured in the dark theater. The Oh-h-h-h-h-h's coming from the offscreen movie are heard as he continues to speak.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: What if there's no God, and you only go around once and that's it? Well, you know, don't you want to be part of the experience? You know, what the hell, it-i-it's not all a drag. And I'm thinking to myself, geez, I should stop ruining my life...
As Mickey talks, the film cuts back to the antics of the Marx Brothers on the black-and-white theater screen. The four brothers are now swaying and singing and strutting, their voices indistinct over Mickey's narration.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: ...searching for answers I'm never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts. And... you know...
The film is back on Mickey's dark form in the audience.

MICKEY'S VOICE-OVER: ...after, who knows? I mean, you know, maybe there is something. Nobody really knows. I know, I know "maybe" is a very slim reed to hang your whole life on, but that's the best we have. And... then, I started to sit back, and I actually began to enjoy myself.
As Mickey continues, the film cuts back to Duck Soup on the black-and-white screen. The Marx Brothers are sitting on a judge's bench, playing banjos and singing with the other cast members. They jump down from the bench, still singing. Their voices swell.

MARX BROTHERS & COMPANY: "Oh, Freedonia / Oh, don't you cry for me / They'll be coming around the mountain..."
The Marx Brothers kneel, strumming their banjos, and the movie cuts back to Central Park...

Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young

2006-07-18T09:53:00.000+10:00

A newspaper column by Mary Schmich, published by the Chicago Tribune on 01 June 1997.

Inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, some world-weary pundit eager to pontificate on life to young people who'd rather be Rollerblading. Most of us, alas, will never be invited to sow our words of wisdom among an audience of caps and gowns, but there's no reason we can't entertain ourselves by composing a Guide to Life for Graduates.

I encourage anyone over 26 to try this and thank you for indulging my attempt.

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97:

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.

Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

Deteriorata

2006-07-09T22:52:00.000+10:00

National Lampoon recorded this song in 1972 as a parody of the spoken-word Desiderata. Lyrics were by Tony Hendra. (see Wikipedia)

(You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
Deteriorata, Deteriorata)

Go placidly amidst the noise and waste, and remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof. Avoid quiet and passive persons, unless you are in need of sleep. Rotate your tires. Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself; and heed well their advice, even though they be turkeys. Know what to kiss - and when. Consider that two wrongs never make a right, but that three do. Wherever possible, put people on hold. Be comforted, that in the face of all irridity and disillusionment, and despite the changing fortunes of time, there is always a big future in computer maintenance.

(You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
Whether you can hear it or not,
The universe is laughing behind your back.)

Remember the Pueblo. Strive at all times to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate. Know yourself. If you need help, call the FBI. Exercise caution in your daily affairs, especially with those persons closest to you... That lemon on your left, for instance. Be assured that a walk through the seas of most souls would scarcely get your feet wet. Fall not in love, therefore, it will stick to your face. Gracefully surrender the things of youth: the birds, clean air, tuna, Taiwan - and let not the sands of time get in your lunch. Hire people with hooks. For a good time, call 606-4311, ask for Ken. Take heart in the deepening gloom that your dog is finally getting enough cheese. And reflect that whatever misfortune may be your lot, it could only be worse in Milwaukee.

(You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
Whether you can hear it or not,
The universe is laughing behind your back.)

Therefore, make peace with your god, whatever you perceive him to be: hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin. With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal, the world continues to deteriorate. GIVE UP!

(You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
Whether you can hear it or not,
The universe is laughing behind your back.)

;)

Desiderata

2006-07-09T22:30:00.000+10:00

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let not this blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.

- Max Ehrmann

According to the notes accompanying a recorded-voice version, Max Ehrmann wrote the poem in 1906 and then in 1927 applied for copyright under the title, "Go Placidly Amid the Noise and Haste".

There are so many different copies online, I don't know how it's supposed to be set out. This is the Wikipedia version, just because it's the one I like best :)

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

2006-07-02T14:46:00.000+10:00

Robert L. Fulghum. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Ballantine Books, 2003 (1986, 1988) ISBN: 034546639-X, pp.1-3.

Taken from the excerpt at Amazon.com; book details are here.

Credo

Each spring, for many years, I have set myself the task of writing a personal statement of belief: a Credo. When I was younger, the statement ran for many pages, trying to cover every base, with no loose ends. It sounded like a Supreme Court brief, as if words could resolve all conflicts about the meaning of existence.

The Credo has grown shorter in recent years - sometimes cynical, sometimes comical, and sometimes bland - but I keep working at it. Recently I set out to get the statement of personal belief down to one page in simple terms, fully understanding the naïve idealism that implied.

The inspiration for brevity came to me at a gasoline station. I managed to fill my old car's tank with super deluxe high-octane go-juice. My old hoopy couldn't handle it and got the willies - kept sputtering out at intersections and belching going downhill. I understood. My mind and my spirit get like that from time to time. Too much high-content information, and I get the existential willies. I keep sputtering out at intersections where life choices must be made and I either know too much or not enough. The examined life is no picnic.

I realized then that I already know most of what's necessary to live a meaningful life - that it isn't all that complicated. I know it. And have known it for a long, long time. Living it - well that's another matter, yes? Here's my Credo:

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:

Share everything.

Play fair.

Don't hit people.

Put things back where you found them.

Clean up your own mess.

Don't take things that aren't yours.

Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.

Wash your hands before you eat.

Flush.

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.

Take a nap every afternoon.

When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

Wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.

Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.

And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are - when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Copyright: Robert L. Fulghum

Stories

2006-06-12T22:02:00.000+10:00

The ABC_TV programa australiana sToryte6yt is celberatingits 10th years and its futu4re loooks bright;l Smoall in budge tubig in falues, Ausytralian Sorty ahas notelveisionrival in telling a wide variety of stoeies atha are consistenlytly engaging.

:)

Just a little typing joke, reader.

Stephanie Dowrick, "The heart of the story," Good Weekend magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 June 2006, p.57.

'The ABC-TV program Australian Story is celebrating its 10th year and its future looks bright. Small in budget but big in values, Australian Story has no television rival in telling a wide variety of stories that are consistently engaging. And one of the loveliest things is that the power of the program's storytelling scarcely depends on whether the person is already famous or entirely unknown beyond their own world.

The person is always more than just an "angle". And in a remarkably short time, a picture emerges that's both very personal and also universal in the sense that we, the viewers, can relate to it in some way, even if our stories are very different.

Storytelling is one of humankind's most basic arts and the drive to listen to and tell stories is deep in almost everyone. It's the telling of stories that allows us to explore a situation or interaction that matters to us, to make sense of it or to relive it.

There is something about others' participation through listening that is also vital. When the story is one that really matters to us, it often releases a great deal of tension to tell it - and sometimes tell it again and again. Listening to ourselves as we share with others, we are doing more than "getting it out". We are giving ourselves a chance to receive comfort and validation, and helping ourselves to make sense of things, to find a pattern and perhaps a way forward.

Some of us (and I am one of these people) read countless novels, as well as biographies and autobiographies, for insights into lives we will never live. Many of us watch movies or TV soaps where the slowly evolving stories of characters come to seem extraordinarily real.

But even those with no time for formal storytelling will tune in to the power of story somehow. It could be yarns swapped at the pub. Or shared anecdotes quickly told in the tearoom at work. It could be the telling of secrets to a stranger in an airport, the snatched accounts of parenting shared at the school gate, a two-line "story" sent as a text, or a few minutes' genuine sharing in a hospital waiting room.

Storytelling brings us straight into the heart of the human community. Often it makes our own lives richer as we come almost simultaneously to understand our own concerns a little better while tuning in to those of other people.

In fact, it is the sharing of stories - the opening of windows into our own and others' lives - that shows us how like others we are in our needs and yearnings, as well as the ways in which each of us is unique and entirely special.

Perhaps the power of storytelling is most dramatically demonstrated in the countless support groups that exist for people who are facing a tough crisis or a difficult recovery. Storytelling is the therapy in these groups: therapy in the most natural and authentic sense of that word, with talking and listening playing equally vital roles.

It is healing and consoling to listen deeply to others' stories, and to discover how possible it is to offer other people the trust and openness that comes with authentic listening - even when you feel you have nothing of value left to give. Such giving and receiving of comfort simply through sharing stories is extraordinarily effective. It doesn't mean it can make things right when they feel all wrong. It does mean that people can experience comfort, trust and solace, maybe hope, when they least expect it.

When our lives are not in crisis, and especially when our schedules threaten to bury us, it is easy to overlook the power of story, to regard it as a burden, or to cut ourselves off from speaking authentically or listening patiently. Yet even in the easiest of times, story and storytelling remain vital to who we are - and how we connect to the rest of our human family.'

http://www.stephaniedowrick.com/

Birds

2006-04-18T19:37:00.000+10:00

A photographic list of all the local birds I can catch on camera. The surprising thing is that the most common and most obvious ones - the ravens, currawongs, ibis and egrets - seem to be the most shy, and I'm having real trouble getting close enough to photograph them. The pics aren't terrific even when I CAN photograph them, but they're the best I can do within the limits of the camera's ability** and my patience.

Anyway, I intend to keep updating this list if I can come up with better versions of each photo, but this will depend on how long my enthusiasm lasts. Could be a day, could be a week...

PS. Clicking on a picture will show the image in a slightly larger size.

Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen)

Australian Raven (Corvus coronoides)

Black-Cockatoo, Yellow-tailed (Calyptorhynchus funereus)

Yellow-tailed Black-Cockatoo 2

Cattle Egret (Ardea ibis)

Crested Pigeon (Geophaps lophotes)

Eastern Rosella (Platycercus eximius)

Eastern Rosella 2

Grey Fantail (Rhipidura fuliginosa)?

Grey Fantail 2?

Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae)

Lewin's Honeyeater (Meliphaga lewinii)

Masked Lapwing (Plover) (Vanellus miles)
When I approach them on foot, these birds fly away before I can get close enough for a photo. But today I was driving along beside the road on a very noisy ride-on mower while 3 birds were walking on the road (there's not much traffic to worry about) and they weren't perturbed at all. I was only a few metres away from this one, and it just stood and watched me for a while, then wandered off. Very strange.

Noisy Miner (Manorina melanocephala)
When I was at primary school, we called these birds Squeakers. I don't know whether it's a name that was used more widely or only in our school, but regardless, it was appropriate. They do sound squeaky at times (they're not called Noisy for nothing).

Pied Butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis)

Pied Butcherbird 2 (immature)

Pied Currawong (Strepera graculina)

Rainbow Bee-eater (Merops ornatus)

Red-browed Firetail (Neochmia temporalis)

Scaly-breasted Lorikeet (Trichoglossus chlorolepidotus)

Scaly-breasted Lorikeet 2

Scarlet Honeyeater (Myzomela sanguinolenta)

Straw-necked Ibis (Threskiornis spinicollis)

Superb Fairy-wren, female (Malurus cyaneus)

Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aquila audax)

Wedge-tailed Eagle 2

Wedge-tailed Eagle 3

Welcome Swallow (Hirundo neoxena)

Welcome Swallow 2 & morning moon, 19 April 2006.

White Ibis (Threskiornis molucca)

White-faced Heron (Ardea novaehollandiae)

Willie Wagtail (Whipidura leucophrys)

Too impossibly cute.

** I'm using a Konica Minolta DiMage X31 which - for a fully automatic basic camera - is a thing of wonder, but its lens isn't designed for doing long-range closeups. So I'm shooting at a high image-quality setting (2048 x 1536 pixels) and then trimming the pictures back to 400 x 300 pixels using Adobe PhotoDeluxe (Home Edition v.3; it's pretty old now). In its "Save & Send: To World Wide Web" section, the Adobe allows you to trim, then check the size, then retrim, recheck the size... on and on for as long as you like, something that's not available in the camera's editing software.

Anyway, here's what it looks like:

(1) the original shot, not trimmed (resized here to 400 x 300 pixels)

(2) the same shot, trimmed to 400 x 300

Black-shouldered Kite (Elanus axillaris)?
It looks black because the exposure is hopeless, but in fact this bird is mostly white. It was hovering over the hillside like this, looking at the ground, then flying a bit further forward and hovering again.

Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?

2006-04-12T23:10:00.000+10:00

Kruger, Justin; Epley, Nicholas; Parker, Jason; Ng, Zhi-Wen,** “Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 89(6), December 2005, pp. 925-936.

© 2005 by the American Psychological Association

Full text available for download or email through the PsycARTICLES/Ovid database.

[Please note that I replaced all “<” symbols with “[less than]” (because they seemed to be messing with the HTML) and all “2” symbols should appear in superscript, but don't (because I can't).]

---
Abstract

Without the benefit of paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation, it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over electronic mail (e-mail). Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one's own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else. Because e-mail communicators “hear” a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.

---

Social judgment is inherently egocentric. When people try to imagine the perspective, thoughts, or feelings of someone else, a growing body of evidence suggests that they use themselves as an anchor or reference point. Although precisely why this occurs - whether the result of an overlearned and generally valid heuristic, the residual byproduct of an earlier stage of childhood egocentrism, or the inevitable consequence of an effortful cognitive process such as anchoring and adjustment - is a matter of some debate, the fact remains that the assessment of another's perspectives is influenced, at least in part, by one's own (Camerer, Loewenstein, & Weber, 1989; Epley, Keysar, Van Boven, & Gilovich, 2004; Fischhoff, 1975; Flavell, 1977; Fussell & Krauss, 1991; Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000; Gilovich, Savitsky, & Medvec, 1998; Hoch, 1987; Inhelder & Piaget, 1958; Kelley & Jacoby, 1996; Keysar, Barr, & Horton, 1998; Keysar & Bly, 1995; Nickerson, 1999, 2001; Ross & Ward, 1996).

Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in the music tapping study conducted by Elizabeth Newton (1990). Participants in her study were asked to tap the rhythm of a well-known song to a listener and then assess the likelihood that the listener would correctly identify the song. The results were striking: Tappers estimated that approximately 50% of listeners would correctly identify the song, compared with an actual accuracy rate of 3%.

What accounts for this dramatic overestimation? The answer becomes immediately apparent when one contrasts the perspectives of tappers and listeners, as Ross and Ward (1996) invited their readers to do when describing Newton's results. Whereas tappers could inevitably “hear” the tune and even the words to the song (perhaps even a “full orchestration, complete with rich harmonies between string, winds, brass, and human voice”), the listeners were limited to “an aperiodic series of taps” (Ross & Ward (1996, p. 114). Indeed, it was difficult from the listener's perspective to even tell “whether the brief, irregular moments of silence between taps should be construed as sustained notes, as musical “rests” between notes, or as mere interruptions as the tapper contemplates the “music” to come next” (p. 114). So rich was the phenomenology of the tappers, however, that it was difficult for them to set it aside when assessing the objective stimuli available to listeners. As a result, tappers assumed that what was obvious to them (the identity of the song) would be obvious to their audience. [1]

Of course, everyday communication is far less constrained than in the music tapping study. Seldom are we required to tap a course lecture or describe our research via Morse code (although it can occasionally seem that way). However, we believe that the lessons learned from Newton's research are nevertheless applicable to everyday communication and one facet of everyday communication in particular: electronic mail (e-mail).

E-mail is one of the most successful computer applications yet devised (Dimmick, Kline, & Stafford, 2000; Marold & Larson, 1999; Wittaker & Sidner, 1997). According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, nearly half of the U.S. population currently uses e-mail, and the number of e-mail messages currently outnumber letters sent by the U.S. postal service (Thompson, 2001). Some have even claimed that e-mail, along with the invention of writing, printing, and telegraphy, represents the only truly revolutionary change in communication technology (de la Sola Pool, 1984). Although text-based communication is nothing new (people have been writing letters to each other for centuries), its ubiquity is: Whereas letters were at best a monthly or weekly affair, people use e-mail on a daily - even hourly - basis (Gatz & Hirt, 2000). And for good reason: E-mail is a quick and convenient method for people to conduct business, stay in touch with friends and family, and even collect data.

But there is something missing from e-mail as well. As psychologists and laypeople know, much of communication is nonverbal (Archer & Akert, 1977; Argyle, 1970; DePaulo & Friedman, 1998). Although the value of nonverbal communication is sometimes overstated (DePaulo, 1992; Krauss et al., 1981; Rime, 1982), the fact remains that nonverbal information is an important cue to the speaker's meaning, particularly when the literal content of the message is ambiguous (Allbritton, McKoon, & Ratcliff, 1996; Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Hufnagel, & Fong, 1991). After all, the same statement can, depending on tone, emphasis, and expression, be either sarcastic or serious, disrespectful or deferential, sanguine or somber (Abrahams, 1962; Clark, 1996; Drew, 1987; Goffman, 1959). Similarly, people use inflection and gesture to soften the blow of negative communication, to literally tone down bad news or mute unfavorable feedback. Whereas speech conveys not only what is said but also how it is said, e-mail is limited to the former. As such, e-mail is an inherently more impoverished communication medium than voice or face-to-face communication (Kiesler, Siegel, & McGuire, 1984; Sproull & Kiesler, 1986; Thompson & Nadler, 2002).

This limitation is likely to be fertile ground for miscommunication and, in particular, a lack of awareness of that miscommunication. E-mail communicators, after all, are well aware of the precise message that they intend to convey. Over e-mail, we know that we are being sarcastic when referring to the comic brilliance of, say, Adam Sandler, just as we know that we are not when making the same statement of John Cleese. Note, however, that what is obvious to us may be considerably less so to the person on the other end of the computer. Whereas we “hear” a statement differently depending on whether we are speaking sarcastically or seriously, our e-mail audience, without the paralinguistic cues that in voice communication flag sarcasm, may not. And because it can be difficult to separate one's own experience of a stimulus from the stimulus available to one's audience, one's e-mail message may be more ambiguous than one realizes.

To be sure, to help resolve such ambiguities, the tech-savvy occasionally make use of symbolic so-called emoticons, such as the smiley face “:-),” the winking smiley face “;-),” or the dreaded “:-(.” This is not such a clear remedy, however, as many emoticons are themselves ambiguous. Emoticonuniverse.com , for instance, lists no fewer than 300 emoticons, some of which are far from intuitive, including “;-?,” “%-(,” and “:~/.” [2] Moreover, people often neglect to use emoticons altogether, particularly when the sarcasm or humor is “obvious.” We are a reminded of an e-mail a well-known psychologist sent to her colleagues announcing a dinner reception in honor of a job candidate. After the usual promise of free food, good drink, and stimulating conversation, she sarcastically pointed out that “talking to the candidate is not required; just don't embarrass us.” Much to her surprise, some colleagues took offense at the comment, thinking that she was genuinely concerned about the embarrassment that her boorish coworkers might cause. Apparently her colleagues did not realize that she was being sarcastic, and apparently she did not realize that her sarcasm was unclear. [3]

We suspect such misunderstandings are common. People routinely overestimate how well they can communicate over e-mail, we offer, particularly when the meaning of the message is ambiguous. We further argue that this overestimation is caused, at least in part, by egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of moving beyond one's subjective experience of a stimulus and imagining how the stimulus might be evaluated by someone who does not share one's privileged perspective.

Given the growing popularity of e-mail and the fact that successful communication depends partly on the ability to anticipate miscommunication (Keysar & Henly, 2002), these predictions are of both practical and theoretical importance. Despite this, our hypothesis has yet to be investigated in either the social judgment literature or in the rapidly emerging literature on computer-mediated communication. Several researchers have investigated the ability of individuals to communicate over e-mail (e.g., Dennis &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Kinney, 1998; Hebert & Vorauer, 2003; Thompson & Nadler, 2002; Walther, 1993, 1995; Walther, Loh, & Granka, 2005), but no researchers have investigated the perceived ability of individuals to do so, nor have they contrasted the two. The one published exception of which we are aware is a study by Sherman et al. (2001). These researchers found that home page creators predicted that others would form a more positive impression of them than was actually the case, and that this was less true when participants communicated face to face. If one assumes that the home page creators intended to portray a positive impression of themselves, then these data could be interpreted as evidence of overestimation of communication effectiveness. However, note that these researchers did not investigate e-mail, nor did they investigate the cause of this overestimation.

The present research was designed to more directly examine overconfidence over e-mail as well as the mechanism thought to underlie it. In five studies, we compared the perceived and actual ability of participants to communicate over e-mail. In each study, we hypothesized that participants' predicted ability would exceed their actual ability. Our last two studies tested the egocentrism account of this overconfidence by experimentally manipulating the phenomenological experience of e-mailers.

We also compared overconfidence over e-mail with more traditional modes of communication. Whereas our egocentrism analysis suggests that e-mail should be associated with greater overconfidence than, say, voice communication, this is by no means a forgone conclusion. Prior work has found that for all the value of nonverbal information, people have occasional difficulty interpreting nonverbal information (DePaulo, 1992; Keysar & Henly, 2002; Lanzetta & Kleck, 1970). What is more, communicators are often insensitive to these difficulties, believing their nonverbal cues are clearer to others than they really are (Keysar & Henly, 2002) - even when they do not wish them to be (Gilovich et al., 1998; Vorauer & Claude, 1998). All of this suggests that voice communication might be associated with more, rather than less, overconfidence - the opposite of what we predict. To help shed light on this issue, Studies 2 and 3 compared overconfidence in e-mail communication with that of voice communication.

Study 1

Participants in Study 1 were given a list of 10 topics and asked to write two statements about each one. Half of the statements were to be serious and the other half sarcastic. Senders e-mailed the statements to another participant, who attempted to identify which sentences were intended to be sarcastic and which were not. The senders then predicted the receivers' accuracy. We predicted that senders would overestimate their ability to communicate sarcasm to the receiver.

Method

Participants
Twelve Cornell University students participated in exchange for extra credit in an introductory psychology or human development course. All participants had their own personal e-mail account and at least some experience using e-mail, a characteristic of all participants in this research.

Procedure
Participants were recruited in pairs for a study of sarcasm. Each participant was given a list of 10 topics and asked to e-mail two one-sentence statements about each one. The topics varied: Within each pair, one participant was asked to write about parties, art, dating, California, sports, TV, food, cars, literature, and life in Ithaca, New York (the town in which the study took place), and the other participant was asked to write about dorm life, movies, computers, romance, Manhattan, athletics, family, music, politics, and the Cornell Greek system. According to a predetermined random order, participants were instructed to make half of the sentences serious, such as “I do not like first dates,” and the other half sarcastic, such as “I really enjoy dating because I like feeling as self-conscious and inadequate as possible.” To ensure that participants understood what we meant by sarcasm, we presented several examples designed to convey the colloquial meaning of the term: a statement in which one's intended meaning is the exact opposite of the literal meaning. Apart from the examples, participants were given no specific instructions regarding how to accomplish their goal, except being told to avoid using emoticons such as “;-).”

Participants then anticipated how the receiver would interpret their statements. Specifically, participants were told (correctly) that the receiver would attempt to identify which statements were intended to be sarcastic and which were not. Participants then indicated, for each topic, whether they thought the receiver would be able to correctly identify the nature (sarcastic or nonsarcastic) of the two statements by checking a box marked “yes” or “no.” Each participant then read the 20 statements that had been e-mailed by the other participant and indicated on a questionnaire which statements they believed were sarcastic. The design was thus fully within-participants, with each participant serving as both a sender and receiver.

Results and Discussion
We expected participants to overestimate their ability to communicate sarcasm. To test this hypothesis, senders' predictions of the receivers' accuracy were compared with the receivers' actual accuracy. Because the data for each pair are interdependent, the data were analyzed at the level of the dyad. Specifically, we averaged each person's estimate of the number of topics (out of 10) that they expected the other person to successfully decode and compared that number with the number of topics actually decoded. As expected, participants were overconfident: On average, participants expected 97% of their topics to be correctly decoded, compared with the 84% that actually were, t(5) = 3.23, p = .023, d = 1.32.

We attribute these results to egocentrism. Because senders knew, for example, that the statement “Blues Brothers, 2000 - now that's a sequel,” was meant to be sarcastic, they egocentrically assumed that their audience would as well. They presumably did not realize how ambiguous the statement really is without verbal emphasis on the word “that's,” a facial gesture such as an eye roll, or some background information about the communicator (such as his or her taste in films).

Note, however, that despite reliable overconfidence, accuracy rates were quite high (84%). It would therefore be misleading to suggest from these data that people are poor at communicating sarcasm over e-mail. These data do suggest, however, that however able people are, they are not as able as they believe.

Study 2

One limitation of Study 1 was that although participants were overconfident in their ability to communicate over e-mail, it was unclear whether this overconfidence had anything to do with e-mail per se. After all, numerous studies attest to the general tendency of individuals to be overconfident in their endeavors (e.g., Dunning, Griffin, Milojkovic, & Ross, 1990; Keren, 1987; Lichtenstein, Fischoff, & Phillips, 1982; Oskamp, 1965; Vallone, Griffin, Lin, & Ross, 1990; Wright, Rowe, Boger, & Gammack, 1994). The previous study may thus have simply been yet another instantiation of that general tendency. To resolve this ambiguity, in Study 2 we contrasted the overconfidence people display when communicating via e-mail with the overconfidence they display when communicating with their voice. If our egocentrism analysis is correct, then overconfidence should be greater over e-mail than over voice - not because of differences in the perceived ability to communicate but because of differences in the actual ability to communicate.

Study 2 also went beyond Study 1 by assessing confidence among both senders and receivers. Although overconfidence in the ability to communicate a message can be problematic, it can be doubly troublesome when accompanied by overconfidence in the ability to interpret that message. We investigated both kinds of overconfidence in Study 2.

Method

Participants
Sixty Cornell University students participated in exchange for extra credit in an introductory psychology or human development course.

Procedure
Participants completed the experiment in pairs. On arrival to the lab, each member of the pair was escorted to a private room and given a questionnaire. The questionnaire explained that the study concerned how people detect and communicate sarcasm, and that the first part of the experiment involved selecting a series of statements that the other person in the experiment would later be asked to identify as either sarcastic or serious. Participants were next given a list of 20 statements about a number of topics, such as food, Greek life, and Ithaca weather. Half were identified (correctly) as being intended by the original author of the statement to be sarcastic and the other half nonsarcastic. Participants within each pair received a different list so that they would not be sending each other the same statements.

Participants then selected 10 of the statements to communicate to the other person in the experiment. They were told to select the statements that they believed would be easiest for the other person to identify as sarcastic or serious. The number of serious versus sarcastic statements varied randomly across participants, with a mean of five statements per category per participant. Up to this point in the experiment, no mention was made of exactly how the statements would be transmitted to the other participant (i.e., via e-mail, voice, or smoke signal) to ensure that participants in the e-mail and voice conditions did not select systematically different statements.

Meanwhile, the experimenter randomly assigned one member of the dyad to the e-mail condition and the other member to the voice condition. Participants in the e-mail condition were escorted to a computer and asked to type each statement they had selected into the computer exactly as written. Participants in the voice condition, in contrast, were escorted to a tape recorder and asked to read each statement into the tape recorder exactly as written. Both participants were told that the other participant would later attempt to identify the nature (sarcastic or serious) of each statement.

Once they had finished recording their statements, participants predicted how many statements the other participant would be able to decode correctly. Specifically, participants checked a box marked “yes” or “no” for each statement to indicate whether they thought the other person in the experiment would be able to correctly identify the true nature (sarcastic or nonsarcastic) of the statement.

Finally, participants listened to (or read) the statements selected by the other participant. Participants then indicated whether they thought each statement was intended to be sarcastic or nonsarcastic as well as whether they thought they had correctly identified the statement (yes or no). [4] All participants were then thanked, debriefed, and dismissed.

Results and Discussion
Study 2 was a 2 (condition: e-mail vs. voice) × 2 (accuracy: anticipated vs. actual) fully within-group factorial, with the dyad as the level of analysis. Because participants communicated different numbers of sarcastic statements, perceived and actual accuracy were converted to a percentage. Responses from one group were over 3 SDs away from the mean on several dependent variables and were excluded from the analysis, yielding a final sample size of 29 dyads.

Not surprisingly, participants in the voice condition communicated more effectively than those in the e-mail condition. As shown in Figure 1, participants who listened to the statements decoded nearly three-quarters of them, compared with an accuracy rate indistinguishable from chance (50%) among participants who read them on e-mail. But more important, Figure 1 also shows that e-mailers failed to anticipate this difference. Although participants' actual ability to communicate sarcasm varied considerably depending on whether they used e-mail or their voice, t(28) = 2.53, p = .017, d = 0.47, their confidence in their ability did not (t [less than] 1). This between-condition difference in overconfidence was confirmed by a 2 (e-mail vs. voice) × 2 (predicted vs. actual) fully within-group analysis of variance (ANOVA), which yielded only the predicted interaction, F(1, 28) = 5.20, p = .030, [eta]2 = 0.16. Participants were overconfident when they communicated over e-mail, t(28) = 3.40, p = .002, d = .61, but not when they communicated over voice, t [less than] 1.

---
Figure 1

Figure 1. Anticipated and actual ability to communicate by condition (Study 2). Click on image for larger version.

Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Ovid Technologies, Inc.
Version: rel10.2.0, SourceID 1.11354.1.65
---

An interesting finding was that an analogous pattern of overconfidence emerged among participants' ability to detect sarcasm. Recall that after participants attempted to identify the nature (sarcastic or serious) of each statement, they also indicated whether they thought they had been successful. Although participants in the e-mail condition were less able than those in the voice condition to decode sarcasm, they were no less confident (Ms = 89% & 91%, respectively), t [less than] 1. A 2 × 2 ANOVA comparing receivers' perceived and actual ability to detect sarcasm over e-mail and voice revealed that overall, participants were overconfident, F(1, 28) = 33.75, p [less than] .001, [eta]2 = 0.55, but this was particularly true for receivers in the e-mail condition, F(1, 28) = 3.68, p = .065, [eta]2 = 0.12. In sum, participants in this experiment were overconfident in their ability to both convey and detect sarcasm over e-mail, but they were considerably less overconfident over voice.

Study 3

Taken together, the results of Studies 1 and 2 suggest that people are overconfident in their ability to communicate sarcasm over e-mail. Just as people have difficulty divorcing themselves from the melody that inevitably accompanies the act of tapping a song, so, too, do people who send a sarcastic e-mail have difficulty divorcing themselves from the sarcastic tone that inevitably accompanies the act of typing a sarcastic statement.

There are, however, several limitations of the data presented thus far. First, whereas Studies 1 and 2 focused exclusively on the communication of sarcasm (or the lack thereof), note that the egocentrism analysis we have offered ought to apply to any subtle form of communication that relies on paralinguistic cues. Thus, in Study 3, we expanded our empirical focus to include not only sarcasm and seriousness, but sadness and anger as well.

Second, whereas participants in Studies 1 and 2 were strangers, note that the majority of (nonspam) e-mails in daily life are between acquaintances. This presents a potential threat to external validity. After all, it stands to reason that people are generally better at communicating with people they know than with people they do not, which, all else equal, should be associated with decreased, perhaps even eliminated, overconfidence. To address this possibility, Study 3 compared overconfidence among strangers versus friends. In addition to addressing external validity, note that this comparison also enabled us to examine the more general impact of familiarity on overconfidence in communication.

Finally, whereas participants in the voice condition of Study 2 were unable to see one another, this is hardly characteristic of most voice interactions, which are face-to-face (Panko & Kinney, 1995). As such, a more ecologically valid test of the comparative advantages and disadvantages of e-mail versus voice requires a condition in which participants communicate face-to-face. Study 3 included just such a condition.

In addition to increasing external validity, note that including three levels of media richness allowed us to examine precisely what it is about e-mail that engenders increased overconfidence. Because we observed greater overconfidence in e-mail than in voice-only communication in Study 2, the lack of intonation alone appears sufficient to increase overconfidence, but gesture and facial expression may also play a role (Daft & Lengel, 1986; Daft & Trevino, 1987). By comparing perceived and actual ability to communicate in e-mail, voice-only, and face-to-face communication, we could find out.

Method

Participants
One hundred fifty-four pairs of University of Illinois students participated on a volunteer basis.

Procedure
Each pair of participants was recruited door-to-door by one of 77 separate experimenters following a standardized script. Depending on condition, the experimenter was instructed to recruit a pair who identified themselves either as friends or strangers. The experiment took place in one of the participants' residences, which the experimenter verified had Internet access. [5]

Once each member of the pair agreed to participate, the experimenter explained that the study would involve constructing, and then communicating, a series of five statements, each of which would be paired with one of four emotions or tones. Their job, they were told, would be to successfully communicate each specific emotion or tone to the other participant. The medium with which the statements would be communicated, however, varied by condition: Approximately one third of participants were told that they were to e-mail the statements to one another, and the remaining two thirds were told that they were to speak the statements to one another. Within the latter group, half were further told that they would do so either with or without being able to see one another. That is, instead of communicating face-to-face, they would speak with their backs to one another.

Once the pair was told the medium in which they were to communicate, each member was given a list of five topics (music, Illini football, dating, dorm food, and dorm life). Each topic was matched to one of four emotions or tones (sarcasm, seriousness, anger, or sadness). For each topic, the participant's job was to construct a statement that would successfully convey the associated emotion or tone to the other participant when either typed or spoken but without stating the emotion or tone explicitly (e.g., “I am being sarcastic”). Participants also indicated, for each topic, whether they expected the other participant to successfully guess the emotion or tone (on a dichotomous “yes” or “no” scale). Special care was taken to ensure that (a) participants were aware of the communication medium prior to making their predictions (e.g., whether they would be communicating via e-mail, with their voice only, or face-to-face), and that (b) participants understood that the other participant would be picking from a list of the four possible emotions or tones for each topic. As in Study 1, participants in the e-mail condition were restricted from using emoticons.

Next, participants communicated the five statements to one another, one at a time, as instructed (i.e., via e-mail, voice-only, or face-to-face). Specifically, one member of the pair (the sender) spoke or typed all five of his or her statements to the other participant (the receiver), and then the pair switched roles. This was done one sentence at a time, which in the e-mail condition meant that the statements were e-mailed one at a time rather than in a single e-mail. After each statement, the receiver attempted to guess the emotion or tone the sender was attempting to convey (from a list of four) and indicated his or her confidence in that guess by checking a box labeled “yes” or “no.” Once this was complete, all participants were then thanked and debriefed.

Results and Discussion
Our primary prediction was that overconfidence would be greater when participants communicated over e-mail than when participants communicated with their voice. To test this prediction, we conducted a 2 (accuracy: anticipated vs. actual) × 2 (order: Round 1 vs. Round 2) × 2 (acquaintanceship: stranger vs. friend) × 3 (medium: e-mail vs. voice-only vs. face-to-face) mixed-model ANOVA with the dyad as the level of analysis. The first two factors in this design were within-participants variables, and the second two were between-participants variables.

This analysis revealed several significant effects. First, we observed a significant main effect for communication medium, F(1, 148) = 3.67, p = .028, [eta]2 = .05, indicating that on average, both predicted and actual accuracy for both friends and strangers were higher in the voice conditions than in the e-mail conditions. We also observed a main effect for order, F(1, 148) = 11.67, p = .001, [eta]2 = .07, indicating that on average, predicted and actual accuracy for both friends and strangers were higher during the second round of communication than the first. We also observed an unexpected Accuracy × Order × Acquaintanceship interaction, F(1, 48) = 4.17, p = .043, [eta]2 = .03. On average, overconfidence tended to decrease from Round 1 to Round 2 for strangers but tended to increase for friends.

No other main effects or interactions were significant, except for the following two exceptions. First, we observed the predicted main effect for accuracy: Participants predicted that they would successfully communicate more emotions or tones (M = 88.8%) than they actually did (M = 70.4%), F(1, 148) = 118.26, p [less than] .001, [eta]2 = .44. Second, and more important, we observed a significant Accuracy × Medium interaction. As Figure 2 shows, participants were more overconfident when they communicated over e-mail than when they communicated with their voice, F(2, 148) = 3.31, p = .039, [eta]2 = 0.04. As in Study 2, participants' ability to communicate varied considerably depending on whether they used e-mail or their voice, F(2, 151) = 4.68, p = .011, [eta]2 = 0.06, but their confidence in their ability did not, F [less than] 1, ns.

---
Figure 2

Figure 2. Anticipated and actual ability to communicate by condition (Study 3). Click on image for larger version.

Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Ovid Technologies, Inc.
Version: rel10.2.0, SourceID 1.11354.1.65
---

An interesting result was that familiarity also had no influence on the results, Fs [less than] 1, ns. This null effect is important for two reasons. First, it suggests increased familiarity does not necessarily translate into increased communication accuracy, contrary to what one might expect. Second, and perhaps more important, it makes it clear that the overconfidence observed in Studies 1 and 2 did not emerge simply because participants were strangers rather than friends.

There was also no difference in either predicted or actual communication accuracy between the face-to-face and voice-only conditions, Fs [less than] 1, ns. These data, together with the data presented in Study 2, suggest that the increased overconfidence in e-mail is due to the lack of intonation and vocalization rather than the lack of gesture and expression. That said, this null result is not without alternative interpretations. For instance, whereas participants in Studies 1 and 2 predicted their accuracy after communicating over their assigned medium, participants in Study 3 did so before communicating. Although all participants in Study 3 were well aware of the medium in which they were about to communicate their message, and although the results of Study 3 perfectly dovetail with the results of Studies 1 and 2, it could be argued that collecting predicted accuracy before direct experience with the communication medium diminishes the latter's impact on the former. This methodological feature was necessary in Study 3 to avoid introducing a procedural confound, as only participants in the face-to-face condition would have had access to a listener's nonverbal response to their communication when predicting their communication accuracy. Nevertheless, future research that effectively counterbalances predicted accuracy and actual communication is necessary to draw definitive conclusions about differences in overconfidence between voice and face-to-face interactions.

Our final set of analyses focused on overconfidence in participants' ability to comprehend subtleties in communication. Recall that participants in Study 2 were not only overconfident in their ability to convey sarcastic messages, but were also overconfident in their ability to detect sarcastic messages. Study 3 showed a similar pattern. Overall, participants believed that they understood more emotions and tones (M = 89.4%) than they in fact did (M = 70.4%), F(1, 148) = 114.07, p [less than] .001, [eta]2 = 0.44. This effect was bigger, however, in the e-mail condition (M predicted = 89.3% vs. M actual = 62.8%) than in either the face-to-face (M predicted = 89.4% vs. M actual = 73.9%) or voice-only (M predicted = 89.4% vs. M actual = 73.3%) conditions, F(2, 148) = 3.66, p = .028, [eta]2 = 0.05. Here, too, this effect was uninfluenced by acquaintanceship: Participants were just as overconfident when communicating with a stranger as when they were communicating with a friend, F [less than] 1, ns.

Study 4

Why do people overestimate their ability to communicate over e-mail? Our thesis is that people are biased by their own phenomenology when trying to imagine the perspective of someone else. Because people know when they are trying to be sarcastic, for instance, they egocentrically assume that their audience will know as well.

Study 4 was the first of two studies designed to test this egocentrism explanation directly. Participants communicated sarcasm to one another in a manner similar to Study 2, with one major exception: Before predicting whether the other participant would interpret the statements correctly, participants were asked to read each statement out loud into a tape recorder. Half of the participants were asked to intonate in a manner consistent with the intended meaning (i.e., to read the sarcastic messages sarcastically) and the other half in a manner inconsistent with the intended meaning (i.e., to read the sarcastic messages seriously).

Our reasoning was simple. If people are overconfident in their ability to communicate over e-mail partly because of the difficulty of moving beyond their own perspective, then forcing people to adopt a perspective different from their own ought to reduce this overconfidence. As a result, participants who vocalized the messages in a manner inconsistent with the intended meaning should be less overconfident than those who vocalized the messages in a manner consistent with the intended meaning.

Method

Participants
Fifty-four University of Illinois students participated in pairs in exchange for course credit in an introductory psychology course.

Procedure
As in Study 2, participants were given one of two lists of 20 statements, half of which were sarcastic and half of which were not. Participants were told to select 10 statements that they felt would be particularly easy for the other participant to identify as either sarcastic or serious and to type each one into a computer for the other participant to read later in the experiment. Up to this point, the procedure mirrored Study 2 except that there was no voice condition (i.e., all participants communicated with one another via e-mail), and participants were asked to select five sarcastic and five serious statements (instead of a varying number as in Study 2).

When they finished typing, participants were asked to record each statement into a tape recorder, ostensibly for “later analysis.” Half of the participants were asked to vocalize each statement just as intended, that is, to speak in a sarcastic tone when reading the sarcastic statements and in a serious tone when reading the nonsarcastic sentences. The other half of participants were asked to record each statement in the opposite manner, that is, to say the sarcastic statements seriously and the serious statements sarcastically. After recording each sentence, participants in both conditions rated how sarcastic or nonsarcastic the sentence sounded to them on a scale from 1 (very nonsarcastic) to 11 (very sarcastic) and then predicted whether the other participant in the experiment would be able to correctly identify the statement.

Finally, participants read the statements that had been e-mailed by the other participant in the experiment. As in Study 2, participants indicated whether they thought the statement was intended to be sarcastic or nonsarcastic as well as whether they thought they had guessed correctly or not. All participants were then thanked, debriefed, and dismissed.

Results and Discussion
Our primary prediction was that asking participants to read their messages aloud in a manner inconsistent with their intended meaning would change their phenomenological experience of the stimuli - that is, the sarcastic statements would no longer “sound” quite so sarcastic, nor the serious statements quite so serious - and as a consequence, would reduce overconfidence. Consistent with the first part of this prediction, participants in the opposite-phenomenology condition indicated that the sarcastic statements sounded less sarcastic (M = 4.31) than those in the same-phenomenology condition (M = 7.79), t(26) = 7.78, p [less than] .001, d = 1.50. Similarly, the serious statements sounded less serious to participants in the opposite-phenomenology condition (M = 7.04) than they did to participants in the same-phenomenology condition (M = 3.27), t(26) = 8.77, p [less than] .001, d = 1.69. Because participants were assigned to conditions after selecting their statements, these differences suggest that the manipulation was successful in changing senders' own subjective interpretation of the stimuli.

To investigate whether these differences influenced overconfidence, predicted and actual communication were compared in a 2 (phenomenology: same vs. opposite) × 2 (accuracy: anticipated vs. actual) fully within-group ANOVA, with accuracy operationalized as the percentage of statements correctly identified as either sarcastic or nonsarcastic. [6] This analysis revealed two interesting effects. First, there was a main effect of accuracy: As in the previous three studies, anticipated accuracy (M = 72.3%) exceeded actual accuracy (M = 62.8%), F(1, 26) = 6.13, p = .020, [eta]2 = 0.19. Second, and more important, this main effect was qualified by a significant interaction, F(1, 26) = 8.44, p = .007, [eta]2 = 0.25. As shown in Figure 3, the phenomenology manipulation completely erased participants' overconfidence. Whereas participants in the same-phenomenology condition overestimated the number of sentences their partner in the experiment would be able to correctly identify, t(26) = 4.89, p [less than] .001, d = 0.94, there was no difference in anticipated and actual communication among participants in the opposite-phenomenology condition, t [less than] 1.

---
Figure 3

Figure 3. Anticipated and actual ability to communicate by condition (Study 4). Click on image for larger version.

Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Ovid Technologies, Inc.
Version: rel10.2.0, SourceID 1.11354.1.65
---

As in the previous two studies, participants also were overconfident in their ability to detect sarcasm. On average, participants believed they correctly identified 88.2% of the statements, compared with the actual accuracy rate of 62.8%, F(1, 26) = 59.09, p [less than] .001, [eta]2 = 0.70. This difference was uninfluenced by condition, F [less than] 1, which is hardly surprising given that we manipulated the sender's phenomenology, not the receiver's.

Overall, participants were once again overconfident in their ability to communicate over e-mail. However, this overconfidence was reduced - indeed, eliminated - once participants were forced to adopt a phenomenology that differed from their own. Specifically, asking participants to vocalize their statements in a manner inconsistent with their intended meaning altered their own subjective perceptions of those statements, making the sarcastic statements sounded less sarcastic and the serious statements less serious. As a result, overconfidence disappeared. These findings further implicate egocentrism as a source of overconfidence in e-mail communication. [7]

Study 5

Studies 1 through 3 demonstrated that people are overconfident in their ability to communicate sarcasm, seriousness, anger, and sadness over e-mail, and Study 4 implicated egocentrism as a probable source of this overconfidence. Study 5 was intended to supplement these results by exploring what may be an even more common variety of miscommunication over e-mail: humor. Informal observation suggests that attempts at humor are often less successful over e-mail than one would think. A “funny” joke, “amusing” anecdote, or “hilarious” tale often does not pack the intended punch over e-mail, likely for many of the same reasons attempts to convey emotions and tones over e-mail can fail us. Without the verbal channel, nuances of expression, timing, and emphasis are lost, and our electronic attempts at humor can fall flat.

The present experiment was designed to test this hypothesis as well as to provide converging evidence for the egocentrism account of e-mail overconfidence. Participants e-mailed a series of humorous “deep thoughts” by Jack Handey (a pseudonym of comedian Al Franken) to another study participant. These included observations such as the following:

I guess of all my uncles, I liked Uncle Caveman the best. We called him Uncle Caveman because he lived in cave, and because sometimes he'd eat one of us. Later on we found out he was a bear. (Handey, 1992)

Half of the participants simply read the jokes and then e-mailed them, whereas the other half first watched a videotape of the jokes being read on the TV show Saturday Night Live (SNL). As SNL fans know, part of what makes these jokes funny (and all jokes, for that matter) is not merely the observations themselves, but the nuances of timing and delivery. Thus, we expected participants in the videotape condition to find the observations funnier than would participants in the control condition. But more than that, we expected this difference to translate into participants' predictions of how the jokes would be perceived by the other person in the experiment. Although the actual content of the e-mail would be constant across conditions, we expected that participants would have a hard time distinguishing their subjective experience of the joke from its objective properties available to the person at the other end of the computer. As a result, participants in the videotape condition should expect their e-mail recipient to find the “deep thoughts” funnier than should participants in the control condition. Thus, whereas Study 4 sought to decrease the rift between perception and reality, the present study sought to increase it.

Method

Participants
Fifty-eight University of Illinois students participated in exchange for course credit in an introductory psychology course.

Procedure
Participants in the first phase of the experiment (n = 29) were recruited in groups of 4 to 5. On arrival to the lab, participants were told that the experiment concerned everyday communication and, in particular, how people communicate humor. They were then given a list of 10 “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey.”

Next, participants selected the five “deep thoughts” that they thought were the funniest, which they were told (correctly) would be e-mailed to another participant later in the experiment. Participants in the videotape condition (n = 19) next watched a video compilation of all the “deep thoughts” as being performed on SNL, whereas participants in the control condition (n = 20) did not. All participants then rated how funny they thought each “deep thought” was as well as how funny they thought the person on the other end of the e-mail would think it was. Each rating was made on a separate 1 (not at all funny) to 11 (very funny) scale. The order in which participants provided their own humor rating and their anticipated humor rating was counterbalanced.

In the second phase of the experiment, each participant's selections were e-mailed to a yoked participant (n = 29) who was told to simply read and rate the humor of the five “deep thoughts” using the same scale as above.

Results
The order in which Phase 1 participants made their ratings did not influence the results and is not discussed further.

Our primary predictions were that participants in the SNL condition would find the “deep thoughts” more humorous than those in the control condition, and that this difference would translate into participants' predictions about how the jokes would be evaluated by the person at the other end of the computer. As shown in Figure 4, our predictions were confirmed. Participants in the videotape condition thought that the “deep thoughts” were funnier than did participants in the control condition, t(27) = 7.82, p = .009, d = 0.98, and the same was true of participants' predictions of the recipients' evaluation of the jokes, t(27) = 7.97, p = .009, d = 0.99. Also as shown in Figure 4, this was true despite equivalent actual audience humor ratings in the two conditions, t [less than] 1. As a result, participants overestimated how funny their e-mail recipient would find the jokes, F(1, 27) = 19.55, p [less than] .001, [eta]2 = 0.42. However, a 2 (condition: videotape vs. control) × 2 (audience humor rating: anticipated vs. actual) ANOVA revealed a significant interaction, F(1, 27) = 3.58, p = .069, [eta]2 = 0.12, indicating that this was especially true among participants in the videotape condition.

---
Figure 4

Figure 4. Own, predicted audience, and actual audience humor ratings by condition (Study 5). Humor ratings were on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all funny) to 11 (very funny). Click on image for larger version.

Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Ovid Technologies, Inc.
Version: rel10.2.0, SourceID 1.11354.1.65
---

Discussion
These findings further implicate the role of egocentrism in e-mail (mis)communication. As in Study 4, participants' assessments of the stimuli available to their e-mail recipient were influenced by their own phenomenological experience of the stimuli. As a result, participants overestimated the extent to which humor would be conveyed, but this was particularly true when participants' own phenomenological experience of the stimuli was especially rich. These results are analogous with those of Vorauer and Ross (1999), who found that people overestimated the extent to which their personality traits were transparent to an interaction partner, especially when self-knowledge was salient to them.

Note, however, that participants were hardly unaware that their audience's perspective would differ from their own. As Figure 4 shows, participants recognized that others might not find the jokes quite as funny as they did (the difference between the dashed and solid-black lines). However, as Figure 4 also shows, this difference was not only underestimated, but was completely insensitive to the actual difference in humor. As can be seen, the difference between e-mailers' own impression of the stimuli and their predictions of the e-mail recipients' impression of stimuli was the same regardless of the extremity of the participants' own perspective. As a result, the greater the difference between e-mailers' own perspective of the stimuli and that of their audience, the greater the miscalibration in e-mailers' predictions.

General Discussion

If comprehending human communication consisted merely of translating sentences and syntax into thoughts and ideas, there would be no room for misunderstanding. But it does not, and so there is. People convey meaning not only with what they say, but also with how they say it. Gesture, voice, expression, context - all are important paralinguistic cues that can disambiguate ambiguous messages (Archer & Akert, 1977; Argyle, 1970; DePaulo & Friedman, 1998). Indeed, it is not uncommon for paralinguistic information to more than merely supplement linguistic information, but to alter it completely. The sarcastic observation that “Blues Brothers, 2000 - now that's a sequel” may imply one thing in the presence of paralinguistic cues but quite the opposite in the absence of them.

The research presented here tested the implications of these observations for the rapidly escalating technology of e-mail, a communication medium largely lacking in paralinguistic information. We predicted that because of this limitation subtle forms of communication such as sarcasm and humor, would be difficult to convey. But more than that, we predicted that e-mail communicators would be largely unaware of this limitation. Because participants knew what they intended to communicate, we expected them to assume that their audience would as well.

Five studies confirmed these predictions. In each one, participants overestimated their ability to communicate over e-mail. This was true regardless of whether participants were trying to communicate sarcasm (Studies 1 through 3), humor (Study 5), or some other emotion or tone (Study 4), and regardless of whether participants were free to craft their own communication (Studies 1 and 3) or were constrained by the experimenter (Studies 2, 4, and 5).

Studies 2 through 5 also shed light on one cause of this miscalibration. We reasoned that when people try to anticipate the perspective of their e-mail audience, they focus excessively on their own phenomenology or experience and insufficiently consider the audience's perspective. This implies that the greater the difference between the communicator's own interpretation of the stimuli and the stimuli available to the audience, the greater the miscalibration. Consistent with this account, we found in Studies 2 and 3 that overconfidence was greater when participants communicated over e-mail than by voice, presumably because they failed to consider the extent to which their audience's perspective was different from their own. As shown in Figures 1 and 2, whereas the ability to communicate varied considerably depending on whether participants communicated by e-mail or voice, confidence in that ability did not. To their credit, participants did not assume that their audience would identify all of their sarcastic statements and thus seemed to realize that their audience did not share their own “privileged” perspective. But nor did they take adequate account of the gulf between their own perspective and their audience's.

More direct evidence came from Studies 4 and 5, in which manipulations of e-mailers' own phenomenologies produced corresponding changes in their estimates of what they had communicated to their audience, with overconfidence reduced when the e-mailers' phenomenology was brought into line with their audience's (Study 4) and increased when it was made even more discrepant (Study 5). In other words, whereas Studies 2 and 3 held constant the phenomenology of the communicator and manipulated the richness of the stimuli available to the audience, Studies 4 and 5 held constant the stimuli available to the audience and manipulated the phenomenology of the communicator. In each case, however, overconfidence varied as a function of the difference between the e-mailer's impression of the stimuli and the stimuli available to the e-mail recipient: The bigger the rift between the two, the greater the overconfidence.

Along the way, we also found that participants overestimated their ability to interpret e-mail. In Studies 2 through 4, participants overestimated their ability to discern emotions and tones, and Studies 2 and 3 revealed that this was particularly true over e-mail. Although not central to our hypotheses, we cannot help but note that egocentrism likely plays a role here as well. Once a statement is interpreted as, say, sarcastic, it may be difficult to “hear” the statement any other way, leading people to believe they understood their partner's communication better than they actually did (cf. Ross & Ward, 1996).

Caveats
There are, however, some alternative interpretations of these results that deserve mention. For example, it is possible (albeit unlikely) that participants were simply unfamiliar with e-mail and thus were unaware of its limitations. If so, then the observed overconfidence may have been a function not of egocentrism, but of the novelty of e-mail. Although the background of our participants limits this possibility (most used e-mail regularly, if not obsessively, and all had a personal e-mail account), we suspect that experience with e-mail is an important moderator worth investigating in future research. A reasonable hypothesis is that the more experience people have communicating over e-mail, the less overconfident they are likely to be. Whether overconfidence disappears, however, remains to be seen.

Another possibility is that these results were produced by a misunderstanding of statistical regression. Whenever two variables are imperfectly correlated, extreme values on one variable are associated with less-extreme values on the other. Because communicators' own impressions of the stimuli were likely imperfectly correlated with their audience's, and because participants selected statements that were (to them) particularly funny or sarcastic, they may have failed to recognize that their audience's impressions were likely to be less extreme than their own by chance alone (cf. Kahneman & Tversky, 1973). Note, however, that this possibility cannot account for the interactions observed in Studies 2 through 5 and thus cannot account for our overall pattern of results.

It is also possible that there were important differences between the way participants communicated with one another in our studies and the way people communicate with one another in everyday life that may have influenced the results. For instance, the voice conditions in our studies may have differed from everyday voice communication on factors such as time to plan remarks and level of distraction, which may have influenced calibration. As well, note that we explicitly prohibited participants in the e-mail conditions from using emoticons, which is hardly a feature of most e-mail programs. Although this design feature was necessary to maximize internal validity, it does raise questions about external validity. After all, emoticons are specifically designed to reduce the ambiguity of e-mail communication; thus, prohibiting participants from using them may have artificially reduced accuracy and increased overconfidence.

Despite the surface plausibility of this caveat, there are several reasons to doubt it. First, note that although emoticons can help disambiguate messages, many emoticons are themselves ambiguous (does that “;-)” after “I'm really looking forward to seeing you” mean that she is flirting - or kidding?). Second, note that people typically use disambiguating emoticons only when they feel that there is an ambiguity that needs disambiguating, an event that the present research suggests people are likely to underestimate.

Further reason to doubt this alternative comes from a follow-up study. Participants e-mailed a series of statements to one another in a manner similar to that of Study 3. In particular, participants were given a list of 10 topics (e.g., music, politics, dorm life) and for each one were asked to construct a sentence that would effectively communicate a specified emotion or tone (such as sarcasm or anger). They were told (correctly) that each statement would be e-mailed to another participant in the experiment, the latter of whom would then try to guess the intended emotion or tone (from a provided list of 20). We predicted, as in the previous studies, that senders would overestimate the success rate of receivers. Unlike the previous studies, however, we experimentally manipulated whether participants were able to use emoticons. We found that overconfidence did not differ between those who were using emoticons and those who were not. Thus, it does not appear that our results can be attributed to the restriction against the use of emoticons.

Nor can the results be attributed to the lack of acquaintanceship of our participants. We explicitly examined this issue in Study 3 and found that overconfidence was independent of whether participants were acquainted with their communication partner. At first blush, this would seem counterintuitive. After all, it stands to reason that people are generally better at communicating with people they know than with people they do not, which, all else equal, should be associated with decreased, perhaps even eliminated, overestimation of that accuracy. But all, we suspect, is not equal. First, note that even if familiarity was associated with improved communication, it would also be likely to be associated with improved confidence, which might result in increased, rather than decreased, overconfidence (cf. Gill, Swann, & Silvera, 1998; Swann & Gill, 1997; Van Boven et al., 2000). Second, it is not clear that acquaintanceship ought to enhance accuracy to begin with: Prosody is shared, and it is unclear whether familiarity with one's speaker or addressee would convey much additional benefit. Indeed, in Study 3, we found no evidence of increased communication effectiveness among acquaintances.

Implications

Although our focus has been on e-mail miscalibration, we believe that the overconfidence we have documented here likely characterizes a wide range of rapidly emerging media types. Chat rooms, instant messaging, text-based gaming environments - all have been touted for their superiority to asynchronous text media such as e-mail because of the dynamic nature of the discourse and ability to provide rapid feedback. But because these synchronous media are largely text-based, there likely remains a rift between the subjective stimuli available to the communicator and the objective stimuli available to the audience that communicators may fail to fully appreciate. In fact, we suspect the synchronous and rapid nature of these mediums may actually increase the rift between senders and receivers. Compared with synchronous media, asynchronous text media such as e-mail more readily allow for reflection and reconsideration of one's communication before transmission. As we saw in Study 4, such a moment of reconsideration may allow communicators to recognize the ambiguity inherent in their messages and thereby increase communication calibration. Of course, future research is necessary in order to test these hypotheses.

To be sure, we do not mean to suggest that egocentrism in communication is always undesirable. As others have pointed out, using one's own perspective as an indicator of another's is a generally valid, useful heuristic - one whose absence would render effective communication overwhelmingly difficult (Davidson, 1982; Hoch, 1987; Nickerson, 2001). But in a world with as many diverging perspectives as our own, the downside to egocentrism seems quite clear as well. To the extent that successful communication depends on an accurate assessment of one's clarity (Keysar & Henley, 2002), overconfidence of that clarity reduces the quality of communication. Specifically, overestimating the obviousness of one's intentions can lead to insufficient allowances for ambiguities in communication - with occasionally destructive results (Kruger, Gordon, & Kuban, in press).

Consider, for example, the phenomenon known in electronic bulletin boards and e-mail groups as “flaming”; the cascade of openly hostile e-mail that follows a violation of electronic etiquette, or “netiquette” (Sproull, Kiesler, & Zubrow, 1984). Although this phenomenon was originally attributed to the disinhibition and deindividuation afforded by the anonymity of the Internet (Kiesler et al., 1984; Siegel, Dubrovsky, Kiesler, & McGuire, 1986; Sproull & Kiesler, 1991), evidence for this interpretation is at best mixed (Lea, O'Shea, Fung, & Spears, 1992; Lea & Spears, 1991). Instead, we suspect that the phenomenon can be traced, at least in part, to egocentrism. To the extent that people overestimate the obviousness of the fact that they are “just kidding” when they poke fun or criticize, they may unwittingly offend.

References

Abrahams, R. D. (1962). Playing the dozens. Journal of American Folklore, 75, 209–220.

Agnes, M., (Ed.) (1999). Webster's new world dictionary (4th ed.). New York: Macmillan.

Allbritton, D. W., McKoon, G., & Ratcliff, R. (1996). Reliability of prosodic cues for resolving syntactic ambiguity. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 22, 714–735.

Archer, D., & Akert, R. M. (1977). Words and everything else: Verbal and nonverbal cues in social interpretation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 443–449.

Argyle, M. (1970). Social interaction. New York: Atherton Press.

Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Weber, M. (1989). The curse of knowledge in economic settings: An experimental analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 97, 1232–1254.

Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Daft, R. L., & Lengel, R. H. (1986). Organizational information requirements, media richness, and structural design. Management Science, 32, 554–571.

Daft, R. L., & Trevino, L. (1987). Message equivocality, media selection, and manager performance. MIS Quarterly, 11, 355–366.

Davidson, D. (1982). Paradoxes of irrationality. In R. Wollheim & J. Hopkins (Eds.), Philosophical essays on Freud (pp. 289–305). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

de la Sola Pool, I. (1984). Communication flows: A census in the United States and Japan. Amsterdam: University of Tokyo Press.

Dennis, A. R., & Kinney, S. T. (1998). Testing media richness theory in the new media: The effects of cues, feedback, and task equivocality. Information Systems Research, 9, 256–274.

DePaulo, B. M. (1992). Nonverbal behavior and self-presentation. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 203–243.

DePaulo, B. M., & Friedman, H. S. (1998). Nonverbal communication. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindsey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology: Vol. 2 (4th ed., pp. 3–40). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Dimmick, J., Kline, S., & Stafford, L. (2000). The gratification niches of personal e-mail and the telephone: Competition, displacement, and complementarily. Communication Research, 27, 227–248.

Drew, P. (1987). Po-faced receipts of teases. Linguistics, 25, 219–253.

Dunning, D., Griffin, D. W., Milojkovic, J. D., & Ross, L. (1990). The overconfidence effect in social prediction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 568–581.

Epley, N., Keysar, B., Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T. (2004). Perspective taking as egocentric anchoring and adjustment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 327–339.

Fischhoff, B. (1975). Hindsight = = foresight: The effects of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 288–299.

Flavell, J. (1977). Cognitive development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Fussell, S. R., & Krauss, R. M. (1991). Accuracy and bias in estimates of others' knowledge. European Journal of Social Psychology, 21, 445–454.

Gatz, L. B., & Hirt, J. B. (2000). Academic and social integration in cyberspace: Students and e-mail. Review of Higher Education, 23, 299–318.

Gill, M. J., Swann, W. B., & Silvera, D. H. (1998). On the genesis of confidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1101–1114.

Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one's own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 211–222.

Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V. H. (1998). The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others' ability to read one's emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 332–346.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Handey, J. (1992). Deep thoughts. New York: Penguin.

Hebert, B. G., & Vorauer, J. D. (2003). Seeing through the screen: Is evaluative feedback communicated more effectively in face-to-face or computer-mediated exchanges? Computers in Human Behavior, 19, 25–38.

Hoch, S. (1987). Perceived consensus and predictive accuracy: The pros and cons of projection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 221–234.

Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence: An essay on the construction of formal operational structures. New York: Basic Books.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review, 80, 237–251.

Kelley, C. M., & Jacoby, L. L. (1996). Adult egocentrism: Subjective experience versus analytic bases for judgment. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 157–175.

Keren, G. (1987). Facing uncertainty in the game of bridge: A calibration study. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 39, 98–114.

Keysar, B. (1994). The illusory transparency of intention: Linguistic perspective taking in text. Cognitive Psychology, 26, 165–208.

Keysar, B., Barr, D. J., & Horton, W. S. (1998). The egocentric basis of language use: Insights from a processing approach. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 46–50.

Keysar, B., & Bly, B. (1995). Intuitions of the transparency of idioms: Can one keep a secret by spilling the beans? Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 89–109.

Keysar, B., & Henly, A. S. (2002). Speakers' overestimation of their effectiveness. Psychological Science, 13, 207–212.

Kiesler, S., Siegel, J., & McGuire, T. W. (1984). Social psychological aspects of computer-mediated communication. American Psychologist, 39, 1123–1134.

Krauss, R. M.et al. (1981). Verbal, vocal, and visible factors in judgments of another's affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 312–320.

Kruger, J., Gordon, C., & Kuban, J. (in press) Intentions in teasing: When “just kidding” just isn't good enough. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Lanzetta, J. T., & Kleck, R. E. (1970). Encoding and decoding of nonverbal affect in humans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16, 12–19.

Lea, M., O'Shea, T., Fung, P., & Spears, R. (1992). “Flaming” in computer-mediated communication: Observations, explanations, implications. In M. Lea (Ed.), Contexts of computer-mediated communication (pp. 89–112). New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Lea, M., & Spears, R. (1991). Computer-mediated communication, de-individuation and group decision-making. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 34, 283–301.

Lichtenstein, S., Fischhoff, B., & Phillips, L. D. (1982). Calibration of probabilities: The state of the art to 1980. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 306–334). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Marold, K. A., & Larson, G. (1999). Is the range war over? An investigation into preferences for e-mail and v-mail. Social Science Computer Review, 17, 466–471.

Newton, L. (1990). Overconfidence in the communication of intent: Heard and unheard melodies. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

Nickerson, R. (1999). How we know—and sometimes misjudge—what others know: Imputing one's own knowledge to others. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 737–759.

Nickerson, R. S. (2001). The projective way of knowing: A useful heuristic that sometimes misleads. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 168–172.

Oskamp, S. (1965). Overconfidence in case-study judgments. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 29, 261–265.

Panko, R., & Kinney, S. T. (1995). Meeting profiles: Size, duration, and location. Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 4, 1002–1011.

Price, P. J., Ostendorf, M., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Fung, C. (1991). The use of prosody in syntactic disambiguation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 90, 2956–2970.

Rime, B. (1982). The elimination of visible behaviour from social interactions: Effects on verbal, nonverbal and interpersonal variables. European Journal of Social Psychology, 12, 113–129.

Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1996). Naive realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In E. Reed, E. Turiel, & T. Brown (Eds.), Social cognition: The Ontario Symposium (pp. 305–321). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Sherman, R. C., End, C., Kraan, E., Cole, A., Campbell, J., Klausner, J., & Birchmeier, Z. (2001). Metaperception in cyberspace. Cyberpsychology and Behavior, 4, 123–129.

Siegel, J., Dubrovsky, V., Kiesler, S., & McGuire, T. W. (1986). Group processes in computer-mediated communication. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 37, 157–187.

Sproull, L., & Kiesler, S. (1986). Reducing social context cues: Electronic mail in organizational communication. Management Science, 32, 1492–1512.

Sproull, L., & Kiesler, S. (1991). Connections: New ways of working in the networked organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sproull, L., Kiesler, S., & Zubrow, D. (1984). Encountering an alien culture. Journal of Social Issues, 40, 31–48.

Swann, W. B., Jr., & Gill, M. J. (1997). Confidence and accuracy in person perception: Do we know what we think we know about our relationship partners? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 747–757.

Thompson, L., & Nadler, J. (2002). Negotiating via information technology: Theory and application. Journal of Social Issues, 58, 109–124.

Thompson, L. L. (2001). The mind and heart of the negotiator (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Vallone, R. P., Griffin, D. W., Lin, S., & Ross, L. (1990). Overconfident predictions of future actions and outcomes by self and others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 582–592.

Van Boven, L., Kruger, J., Savitsky, K., & Gilovich, T. (2000). When social worlds collide: Overconfidence in the multiple audience problem. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 619–628.

Vorauer, J. D., & Claude, S. D. (1998). Perceived versus actual transparency of goals in negotiation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 371–385.

Vorauer, J. D., & Ross, M. (1999). Self-awareness and feeling transparent: Failing to suppress one's self. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 415–440.

Walther, J. B. (1993). Impression development in computer-mediated interaction. Western Journal of Communication, 57, 381–398.

Walther, J. B. (1995). Relational aspects of computer-mediated communication: Experimental observations over time. Organization Science, 6, 186–203.

Walther, J. B., Loh, T., & Granka, L. (2005). Let me count the ways: The interchange of verbal and nonverbal cues in computer-mediated and face-to-face affinity. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 24, 36–65.

Wittaker, S., & Sidner, C. (1997). E-mail overload: Exploring personal information management of e-mail. In S. Kiesler (Ed.), Culture of the Internet (pp. 277–295). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Wright, G., Rowe, G., Boger, F., & Gammack, J. (1994). Coherence, calibration, and expertise in judgmental probability forecasting. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 57, 1–25.

Notes

1. An analogous example comes from a study by Keysar and Henly (2002) in which participants read aloud several ambiguous sentences (such as “Angela killed the man with the gun”) to another study participant. Speakers read the statement after reading a scenario that resolved the ambiguity of the sentence (e.g., indicated whether the gun was the murder weapon or a possession of the victim), a scenario that was unavailable to listeners. As in the case of the tapping study, speakers assumed that what was obvious to them (i.e., the meaning of the sentence) would be obvious to the listener. Consistent with the speculation of Newton (1990) and Ross and Ward (1996), Keysar and Henly found that the overestimation was due, at least in part, to participants underestimating the ambiguity of their own utterances.

2. According to the Web site, these emoticons imply that the e-mailer “speaks with a forked tongue,” is “confused,” and is “unsure,” respectively.

3. The common usage of the term sarcasm in the United States differs from most dictionary definitions. Webster's, for instance, offers the example of “My, you're early” being said to a latecomer as an example not of sarcasm, but of irony (Agnes, 1999, p. 1272), whereas most Americans would say that the opposite is true. In the present article, we follow the convention set in past research (Keysar, 1994; Keysar et al., 1998) and colloquial use by referring to instances in which one's intended meaning differs from the literal meaning as sarcasm.

4. Decision theorists may point out that an answer of “no” to this question is irrational because it implies that the person believes that his or her answer to the question is less than 50% likely to be correct, and if so, the participant should change it (there being only one other possible response). Given the frequency of “no” responses, we suspect that participants interpreted the question differently than decision theorists.

5. We included this prerequisite regardless of condition in order to minimize sampling bias.

6. We included nonsarcastic as well as sarcastic statements in our measures of perceived and actual accuracy because we expected our manipulation to change not only the phenomenological experience of the sarcastic statements, but the phenomenological experience of the nonsarcastic statements as well.

7. Notice that the videotape manipulation in this experiment is also relatively immune to an alternative interpretation of Study 4 based on experimenter demand. It is possible, after all, that deliberately asking participants to read their statements in a manner different from that originally intended may have led them to infer that the purpose of the manipulation was to reduce overconfidence and to change their responses in an effort to be consistent with this hypothesis. Although this and other demand-related interpretations are perhaps unlikely given that we found evidence for our proposed mediating variable (i.e., the phenomenological experience of the stimuli covaried by condition), Study 5 diminishes this concern even further because the videotape manipulation is a much more subtle manipulation of participants' phenomenology and presumably contains no experimental demand.

Accession Number: 00005205-200512000-00007
Copyright (c) 2000-2005 Ovid Technologies, Inc.
Version: rel10.2.0, SourceID 1.11354.1.65

**
Justin Kruger (New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business)
Nicholas Epley (University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business)
Jason Parker & Zhi-Wen Ng (Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Justin Kruger, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, [...].

This research was supported by Research Grant 1-2–69853 from the University of Illinois Board of Trustees awarded to Justin Kruger and by National Science Foundation Grant SES-0241544 awarded to Nicholas Epley. We thank Tom Gilovich and Ken Savitsky for their helpful suggestions throughout this research.

Received Date: March 24, 2004
Revised Date: August 18, 2004
Accepted Date: August 29, 2004

© 2005 by the American Psychological Association