Read the passages and prepare your response for the questions below.

[A] Scientists have discovered that people who are too optimistic about the future may have ‘faulty brains’ Their study, in the journal Nature Neuroscience, concluded that the reason many people always see light at the end of the tunnel may be because of an inability to sensibly deal with risk. They even say this over-optimism could have been a cause of the 2008 global financial crisis, with bankers failing to accept or see the riskiness of their investments. Report author Dr. Tali Sharot of London’s University College analyzed brain scans to measure the activity taking place in patients who were asked to think about their future. He found that negative predictions were ignored in the minds of optimists. In the study, Dr. Sharot gave volunteers 80 different negative situations ranging from unpleasant to disastrous. These included getting divorced, having your car stolen, and developing cancer. Many of the volunteers underestimated the chances of these situations happening to them. Dr. Sharot said “The more optimistic we are, the less likely we are to be influenced by negative information about the future." He added “Smoking kills messages don’t work as people think their chances of cancer are low. The divorce rate is almost 50%, but people don’t think that it’s applicable to them.”

Question 1.

State your understanding of the passage, and whether you think that people today possess ‘faulty brains’.

 Question 2.

The passage has a negative perspective towards optimism. Counter the argument with reason and support.

[B] The iPhone has revolutionized telecommunications. It has also become the most effective tool in human history to mollify a fussy toddler, much to the delight of parents reveling in their new-found freedom to have a conversation in a restaurant or roam the supermarket aisles in peace. But just as adults have a hard time putting down their iPhones, so the device is now the toy of choice for many 1-, 2- and 3-year-olds. It is a phenomenon that is attracting the attention and concern of some childhood development specialists. Jill Etesse, a mother of two daughters, ages 3 and 8, believes her younger daughter is further along in vocabulary, reading and spelling than her older daughter was at the same age, and she attributes this progress to the iPhone and iPad. But Jane Healy, an educational psychologist in Colorado, said “'Any parent who thinks a spelling program is educational for that age is missing the whole idea of how the preschool brain grows. What children need at that age is whole body movement, the manipulation of lots of objects and not some opaque technology. You’re not learning to read by lining up the letters in the word ‘cat’. You’re learning to read by understanding language, by listening. Here’s the parent busily doing something and the kid is playing with the electronic device. Where is the language? There is none." Tovah Klein, the director of the Barnard Center for Toddler Development at Columbia University in New York, worries that fixation on the iPhone screen every time a child is out and about with parents will limit the child’s ability to experience the wider world.

Question 3.

Explain the two views on the spread of iPhones, and infer how the author of [A] would analyze [B].
 

Background Knowledge

Risk Perception

Risk perception is the subjective judgement that people make about the characteristics and severity of a risk. The phrase is most commonly used in reference to natural hazards and threats to the environment or health, such as nuclear power. Several theories have been proposed to explain why different people make different estimates of the dangerousness of risks. Three major families of theory have been developed: psychology approaches (heuristics and cognitive), anthropology/sociology approaches (cultural theory) and interdisciplinary approaches (social amplification of risk framework).

*Agree – people have faulty brains

 [A] Irrationality

According to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the third great revolution in human thought was brought about by his own discovery: the unconscious. He realized that much of what we do is driven by wishes that are hidden from us. We can’t get at them directly. But that doesn’t stop them affecting what we do. There are things that we want to do that we don’t realize we want to do. These unconscious desires have a deep influence on all our lives and on the way we organize society and have shaped human civilizations. Freud believed that everyone had unconscious wishes and memories. According to Freud, we all do. That is how life in society is possible. We hide from ourselves what we really feel and want to do. Therefore, our unconscious thoughts may drive us to behave in irrational ways. Some of these thoughts are violent and too dangerous to let out. The mind represses them, keeps them down in the unconscious. But whatever it is in us that stops this, and other unconscious desires, from becoming conscious isn’t completely successful. The thoughts still manage to escape, but in disguise and changes our behavior.

 [B] Human Belief Systems

Many studies on how human belief systems operate have shattered the notion that we believe what we see. For the most part, we see what we believe, and it is hard for any perception to change the belief. It's much easier to deny information that doesn't fit our beliefs. For example, if you believe a certain group of people is good, you will see goodness in those people. If you believe a human quality or behavior is good, you will have the tendency to see only goodness when that behavior is encountered. Similarly, if you believe something about you is bad, you will be hard pressed to find anything positive about it. Even when you use the quality in a positive way, there will be the tendency to deny its value.

If you become locked into a viewpoint and make assumptions about "how things are" in the landscape of your life, your individual experiences will start to have less and less impact. Almost regardless of what happens, you will keep your previously established beliefs. Your beliefs and ways of thinking and action become habitual and mechanical. You are then blinded to the variations and possibilities that exist within a situation, leading to serious overreaction and missed opportunities. Conversely, other people can lock into a particularly limited view of your capabilities, or expect you to behave in only stereotyped ways, and it can be terribly difficult to break out of the mental box they have placed you in.

[C] Egoism / Egotism

Egotism is the drive to maintain and enhance favorable views of oneself, and generally features an inflated opinion of one's personal features and importance. It often includes intellectual, physical, social and other overestimations.

The egotist has an overwhelming sense of the centrality of the 'Me', that is to say of their personal qualities. Egotism means placing oneself at the core of one's world with no concern for others, including those "loved" or considered as "close," in any other terms except those subjectively set by the egotist.

[D] Heuristics

A heuristic technique, often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, stereotyping, profiling, or common sense.

In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, learned or hard-coded by evolutionary processes, that have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. Researchers test if people use those rules with various methods. These rules work well under most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic errors or cognitive biases.

[E] Cognitive Biases

A cognitive bias refers to a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion. Individuals create their own "subjective social reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the social world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality.

Bias arises from various processes that are sometimes difficult to distinguish. These include

• information-processing shortcuts (heuristics)
• the brain's limited information processing capacity
• emotional and moral motivations
• social influence

 [F] Ostrich Effect

In behavioral finance, the ostrich effect is the attempt made by investors to avoid negative financial information. The name comes from the common (but false) legend that ostriches bury their heads in the sand to avoid danger. For example, in the event of a market downturn, people may choose to avoid monitoring their investments or seeking out further financial news.

 [G] Myopic Viewpoint

The terms "myopia" and "myopic" (or the common terms "short-sightedness" or "short-sighted", respectively) have been used metaphorically to refer to cognitive thinking and decision making that is narrow in scope or lacking in foresight or in concern for wider interests or for longer-term consequences. It is often used to describe a decision that may be beneficial in the present, but detrimental in the future, or a viewpoint that fails to consider anything outside a very narrow and limited range.

 [H] Optimism

Optimism is a mental attitude or world view. A common idiom used to illustrate optimism versus pessimism is a glass with water at the halfway point, where the optimist is said to see the glass as half full and the pessimist sees the glass as half empty.

The term is originally derived from the Latin optimum, meaning "best". Being optimistic, in the typical sense of the word, is defined as expecting the best possible outcome from any given situation. This is usually referred to in psychology as dispositional optimism. It thus reflects a belief that future conditions will work out for the best.

 *Examples for your argument

[A] Great Pacific garbage patch

The Great Pacific garbage patch, also described as the Pacific trash vortex, is a gyre of marine debris particles in the central North Pacific Ocean discovered between 1985 and 1988. The patch extends over an indeterminate area, with estimates ranging very widely depending on the degree of plastic concentration used to define the affected area.

The patch is characterized by exceptionally high relative concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge and other debris. Because of its large area, it is of very low density (4 particles per cubic meter), and therefore not visible from satellite photography, nor even necessarily to casual boaters or divers in the area. It consists primarily of a small increase in suspended, often microscopic, particles.

 How is this an example of faulty brains?

[B] Nuclear Power (utilization)

[C] Forest Fires (Korea)

 도표

 [D] Arms Race

 * 세계 2차 대전을 종식시킨 미국의 원자폭탄의 위력은 12.5kt(1kt=TNT 1,000t)이며, 크기는 무게 4,400kg, 길이 3m, 지름 70cm 원통형 폭탄 1개였다.

*Disagree – people have rational brains

 A] Pessimism

Pessimism is a state of mind in which one anticipates undesirable outcomes or believes that the evil or hardships in life outweigh the good or luxuries. Value judgments may vary dramatically between individuals, even when judgments of fact are undisputed. The most common example of this phenomenon is the "Is the glass half empty or half full?" situation. The degree in which situations like these are evaluated as something good or something bad can be described in terms of one's optimism or pessimism respectively. Throughout history, the pessimistic disposition has had effects on all major areas of thinking.

Philosophical pessimism is the related idea that views the world in a strictly anti-optimistic fashion. This form of pessimism is not an emotional disposition as the term commonly connotes. Instead, it is a philosophy or worldview that directly challenges the notion of progress and what may be considered the faith-based claims of optimism.

 B] Hyperopic Viewpoint

Hyperopia, the biological opposite of myopia, may also be used metaphorically for a value system or motivation that exhibits "farsighted" or possibly visionary thinking and behavior; that is, emphasizing long-term interests at the apparent expense of near-term benefit.

C] Precautionary Principle

The precautionary principle (or precautionary approach) to risk management states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public, or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus (that the action or policy is not harmful), the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action that may or may not be a risk.

The principle is used by policy makers to justify discretionary decisions in situations where there is the possibility of harm from making a certain decision (e.g. taking a particular course of action) when extensive scientific knowledge on the matter is lacking. The principle implies that there is a social responsibility to protect the public from exposure to harm, when scientific investigation has found a plausible risk. These protections can be relaxed only if further scientific findings emerge that provide sound evidence that no harm will result.

D] Loss Aversion

In economics and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people's tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it is worse to lose one's jacket than to find one. Some studies have suggested that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.

This leads to risk aversion when people evaluate an outcome comprising similar gains and losses; since people prefer avoiding losses to making gains.

 E] Risk Aversion

Risk aversion is the behavior of humans (especially consumers and investors), when exposed to uncertainty, to attempt to reduce that uncertainty. It is the reluctance of a person to accept a bargain with an uncertain payoff rather than another bargain with a more certain, but possibly lower, expected payoff. For example, a risk-averse investor might choose to put his or her money into a bank account with a low but guaranteed interest rate, rather than into a stock that may have high expected returns, but also involves a chance of losing value.

 F] Negativity Effect

The negativity effect is the tendency of some people to assign more weight to negative information in descriptions of others. Research has shown that the negativity effect in this sense is quite common, especially with younger people; older adults, however, display less of this tendency and more of the opposite tendency.

* Examples for your argument

A] Risk Aversion (example)

A person is given the choice between two scenarios, one with a guaranteed payoff and one without. In the guaranteed scenario, the person receives $50. In the uncertain scenario, a coin is flipped to decide whether the person receives $100 or nothing. The expected payoff for both scenarios is $50, meaning that an individual who was insensitive to risk would not care whether they took the guaranteed payment or the gamble.

B] Kyoto Protocol / 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference

C] Nuclear Power (Decreased Use)

D] Insurance

Interview Outline

Question 1

1) What is the definition of ‘faulty brains’ and what arguments does the author use to support his idea?

2) Why do you support or oppose the author’s argument? (Logic + Example)

①

②

Question 2

What are the merits of optimism? (Logic + Example)

①

②

Question 3

1) What is the main idea in [B], and what arguments dose the author use to support his idea?

 2) Recall what the argument of [A] was; assess [B]’s argument using the viewpoint of [A].