Lightning reviews: July

Flattery, musical expression, children, and mindreading.

1: The Power of Bad, by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister.

The calculus of good and bad:

Researchers have repeatedly found that bad things are at least twice as powerful as good things, and generally at least three times as powerful when dealing with emotions and relationships rather than with dollars and cents...So we’ll suggest a guideline that we’ve taken to calling the Rule of Four: It takes four good things to overcome one bad thing.

Need to overcome a bad thing, and nothing comes to mind? Don’t be stingy with flattery:

Clifford Nass ... programmed a computer to brownnose people playing a game of Twenty Questions...[Some players] were warned at the start of the experiment not the believe the computer [because it] was merely offering stock comments that had nothing to do with how well the players performed...the flattery still worked. It blostered the players’ opinion of their own performance as well as the computer’s...The research convinced Nass that flattery just about always works as long as there’s enough of it.

I love this story too much to google “flattery study replication crisis.”

2: “The Expressive Specificity of Jazz,” by Jerrold Levinson.

Of the distinctive features of jazz… perhaps the most central are, on the one hand, improvisation, and on the other, a particular rhythmic feel or groove, of which swing is perhaps the most characteristic manifestation. Now both of those, I suggest, conduce to the expression … of outgoing/joyous/liberating/energizing emotion. It is thus hard for instances of jazz…to express … pain/sorrow/grief, anxiety/uncertainty, somberness/sobriety/solemnity, and so on. Emotions of that sort involve an element of psychic constriction, repression, or blockage that the basic feel, sound, or Gestalt of jazz tends to counter or preclude.

Levinson claims that “music expressive of an emotion is music that sounds like someone expressing that emotion—like someone outwardly manifesting that emotion, but through musical gesture, through what we in effect hear the music as doing.” And, he holds, it is easier to execute musical gestures expressing “positive, energetic” emotions when playing jazz, and harder to execute gestures expressing negative or quiet emotions—in much the way that it is easier to express happiness by leaping about than it is to express anger or sorrow.

Jazz is so diverse, one wants to look for counterexamples: “Jade Visions” by The Bill Evans Trio, for one, is calm and meditative, maybe a bit melancholy. Levinson would say that his thesis cannot be refuted by examples: expressing solemnity (etc) in jazz is hard, Levinson says, not impossible. If it can and has been done, he could still be right.