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  mental health

[ 18 minute read ]

I like to play mind-chess with unsolicited visitors to my home

Every now and then, a pair of people knock on my door to talk to me about Jesus and God. I thoroughly enjoy these moments because I have a deep belief in the spiritual world, so I am not afraid of any witchcraft or hypnotism they might try to trap me with. Some time ago, I came to understand that 'omnipresent' means, in the past, present and the future. That means that, theoretically, we can pray in the future for our sins in the past and God, being in the future, hears those prayers and prevents us being spoiled by sin, or even committing sin. I use this as a universal truth with the evangelists on my doorstep, and we play mind-chess for a while. If, towards the very end of the conversation, I mention that 'omniscient' means knowing what will happens in the past, present, and future, it shows that planning to pray in the future to cover a sin we are about to commit, is useless because it is not sincere. God and I have a good laugh at this over a brandy and a cigar. Neither of us smoke or drink so we just laugh.

I created James and Brian, two characters to show how foolish most of us are, and especially me. At the end, you can hear God laugh at me, as I cheer James when he leaves.

Mind Chess

The allotment was empty when James got there. The gate was open but there were no delusional would-be market-gardeners to be seen. The exposed dry soil made James think of water. It even smelt dusty today; humidity levels were low, and it hadn’t rained for over five weeks. His own plot was green and abundant with fresh growth but everywhere else was a scene of abandonment. Bare soil with random segregated weeds moping in the sun made James contemptuous of the absent hobbyists and pretenders. Only gooseberry bushes seemed to be growing; gooseberries bushes scattered across arid plots surrounded by congregating weeds vying for position. 

Nobody, it seemed, was concerned with neatness or order, yet farmers, James thought, with all the land they cultivate were tidier than these lazy losers. Some things came easy for James. Knowing that having self-propagating flowering plants with lots of ground-covering foliage that prevented the soil drying out in early Spring was just the obvious thing to do, allowed him spare time. He had long ago concluded that if he hadn’t expended any energy sowing these seeds or tending the plants he really didn’t mind digging them up to plant other preferred seedlings. Some things were difficult for James. Compassion and empathy were alien to him, so much so that he was ruthless even with himself. He had had his turn at suffering and avoided any circumstance that had a probability of happiness, as he saw it. Happiness, he felt, could be taken from him, by accident or by someone’s will. He was disappointed with life and lived a life of asceticism, with no expectation of joy. You might expect him to be in fine physical shape but he was lazy, preferring to use his brain to find ways to alleviate or avoid the toil of hard work. He was also young; not even sixty-two yet.

Pushing his bicycle with day-glow green handlebars and front forks, he went further in, hoping for something stimulating that was emotionally free, but finding nothing of interest. His own plot, he saw, was just as he had left it, green and luscious with its covering of Limnanthes douglasii, or Poached Egg plant. This was safe for him; no emotion or effort put in and free aesthetic value taken out. His mental cost – benefit analysis said ‘win – win’. He was about to leave when he spied a man painting a tiny shed, going just beyond scumbling and changing its colour from grey to duck-egg blue.

James quickly learned that Brian used to be a secondary school teacher, because Brian wanted him to know that he used to be useful. By association with his career, Brian hoped that everyone he told would continue to think that he was a hero, a modern day crusader in driving forward decades of young minds into a bright future but was realistically a voracious and gaping maw of banality in the North East of England, that would swallow up even the sharpest of students. James, on the other hand was an unqualified educator; a corrector of intellectual mistakes, and a ruthless and unfeeling man who had dedicated himself to proving everyone he met, wrong, stupid, a waste of space, or obsolete. 

James had strong views and knew the far-reaching extent of his mind outstripped most others. Where others relied on heuristics, James experimented; where others got information from newspapers, television and social media, James parasitically sucked dry selected information he found in the people he met; though never the information that the host thought valuable and had gleaned from their favourite media sources. James was instead searching for tiny connecting pieces to complete his collection of finished thinking. He needed to understand his world in fine detail, so he could eventually show the rest of the world that he was right to be a loner all along.

There are two types of people according to James; sublime people of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth who were beneficial to him; and the rest of the world. James categorised Brian to be obsolete and a drain on public learning. However, Brian, innocently holding his small tin of paint in one hand and a brush in the other, and comfortable in his fug of accumulated miscomprehension had roused James’ interest. Mental stimulation was the drug that kept him alive. He never showed his true colours when he first met someone. Instead, he let them rudely promote themselves and then gave them reasons to go away and think about how they might wake from the weary slumber that was home to their comforting insensibility. James thought himself special. Conversely, he knew this and that is why he hated himself. Self-flagellation had eaten away at James’ confidence and left only a paradigm of behaviour almost completely devoid of compassion.

Initially Brian was friendly and not alarmed and after general conversation on plants and how he had moved his shed Brian suddenly swerved onto a blustering, and clearly unrefined, path with an outburst on people dumping their rubbish in the Birmingham streets. Brian wasn’t quite ranting and James knew that he wasn’t crazy by the standards of the time. He recognised a man that spent at least a couple of hours with a pint in his hand at the bar of his local pub on Sundays. Like everyone else, talking was almost entirely only mental exercise.

‘They just dump their rubbish in the streets’, cried Brian indignantly. ‘I mean their mattresses and things. They should take it all to the tip.’

James, calm in his thinking, knew that not everyone had access to a van or trailer in Birmingham, and there was a rubbish removal-person strike in Birmingham, so no-one could arrange for a mattress or old cupboard to be taken away either. To James, Brian was certainly, by the standards of the day, completely average in his thinking; clearly insane. James, however, was charitable in classing it as ‘lazy and crust coated thinking’. He recognised the patina on Brian’s thinking; patina that was a result of poor maintenance and a reactive exposure to lazy thinkers. ‘Get your thoughts out, use them, Brian, and embellish them with facts and fresh ideas. Where is your inventiveness, Brian?’ he thought. He could almost ‘see’ extraneous bits of thoughts being sheared off in Brian’s head as they were shaped to fit with other similarly corroded thoughts, and cobbled together, to quickly throw up a feeble scaffold so flimsy that only a minor test would knock it down, but sufficient enough for him to formulate his own opinion to use as a remedial buttress; an opinion that once it had reached his fore-brain and left his mouth would be his long-standing fall-back position because it was the only one he had. It would be the next scaffold. Now that it had been recently and neatly placed on the wobbly shelves in the library of Brian’s mind, he would be attracted to its shiny newness. The attendant analogue library filing card for where it was stored, would, with its crisp corners and uncreased facade, for a long while be more attractive than its dog-eared, mis-filed, and stained neighbours. Brian had made his relatable experiences obsolete. Thinking stalled.

James felt compelled to help Brian restart his donkey-engine, cement-mixer type mind; a mind that needed to first be pulled free from a bog of mistreatment.

Unfortunately, the mind is not hermetically sealed from the outside world and the gatekeepers in charge of inward-bound information in Brian’s mind were now baffled by newly installed governors that came in a box-set with a belief that his education was completed when he achieved a recognised teaching qualification.

Brian’s source thought was, ‘I know my subject and the University has told me that I can adequately teach it. I have experience of teaching in secondary schools as part of my degree, so I now know everything I need to bend young minds to think like me. They really should, you know, because I am right. No! More than that, because I care, I am a hero!’

He had, a long time ago, consciously thought, ‘I am so excited. I want to help young people. I really care.’

Any observer could, in retrospect, suggest that the demons were ready and waiting to leap into him to corrupt his valiant hope while he fervently clutched his University approbation, but already they were in him, part of his core, inherited from his parents, and encouraged by his friends and peers.

‘No new information is needed. Don’t explore. You have all the information you need to teach empty heads. Relax.’

‘Well done!’ to Brian meant, ‘You have done enough. You can stop now.’

This necrotic stagnancy was starkly evident to James in the rest of their discussion. Brian had opinions on Government handouts; criminal records preventing people from ever working in their whole lives; and who might attend and be an appropriate recipient at Food Banks. James, with a robust understanding of these social issues through diligent research and empirical knowledge threw in ‘Shame on them!’ as the conversation segued from benefit cheats to habitual scroungers. This left-over salty seasoning of the stew of Brian’s opinion on righteously moaning benefits recipients was too much for Brian’s palate. But James had carefully measured that condiment into his hand to check its volume and supposed effect, and smiled at Brian’s donkey engine mind chewing on old slime and chunks of debris from the his socially-conscious 1990s, when it balked at the jet-wash of fresh briny thinking.

Brian, with his self-assurance, had already made his first mistake with James; thinking that everyone watches television and have similarly long straws that are permanently thrust into the same soup of Orwellian nonsense and thus everyone is supplied with the same delectable but mentally-hostile nourishment. One of the reasons why James did not eat media-cake was because it tastes delicious but is hostile to the body. It satisfies a want, yet secretly poisons a need.

Subconsciously, Brian was reconnoitering for people to add to his group of confirmation-bias addicts; searching for another stumbling mess of a person who prefers an easy route through a jungle of information; a route that was crudely cut by a man with a machete following an animal track, that became a track for illegal loggers. A path that is there by dint of its availability. The more people use it, the more easily it is found, due to its wide and trampled aspect. Brian was used to following the pack. His younger self would have wept.

‘They just dump their rubbish outside other people’s homes in Birmingham.’ Brian remarked, alluding to, though not saying outright, people leaving their rubbish outside the homes of people of colour, and not instead gently placing it outside white people’s homes. James was aware of that happening. He suspected that Brian thought he would jump on his band-wagon of aggrieved righteousness because James was closer in colour to Indians and Middle-Eastern people than the old-school notion of what a European should look like; Scandinavian and Danish Vikings from 1000 years ago. In any case, James didn’t bite. He went the other way in thinking and held one idea back for the shock value, if it was needed.

In his head he went with an idea that, in a lawless environment there is no infrastructure to guide someone towards making mutually beneficial decisions, which came out as, ‘Why not, everyone else is; and where else is there to put it?’ James had now set himself up to fatally fail in his mission to destroy the canker in Brian’s mind. He would never recover from this outward attitude of simplistic laissez-faire.

It was not the first time James had been mistaken for an Asian or Middle-Eastern man. He spent a lot of time outside and grew tanned even by the winter sun. Certainly, he wasn’t going to, without question, be waving a flag for a brown ethnic minority people he did not belong to, and crying foul at every mistake made by a Viking, which Brian, it seems, thought he would.

Neither was he about to run around shouting ‘Up the Vikings!’

‘Is that what you think happens, Brian?’ James thought, ‘Brown people will always have opinions that support only brown people?’ He never said it, though, because he still believed he held the central position in the game of chess, that was, to him, their conversation. He knew that attack would cause Brian to defend, and then there would only be a game of attrition; Brian would never have a confident gambit if he was forced to defend himself. It was his opponents’ gambits that James liked to publicly dissemble.

Brian still believed that James was from the same economic background as himself and maintained his ‘friendly pontificating over a Sunday pint in the village local’ attitude. He breached the subject of criminality and having a criminal record forever preventing young adults from getting jobs. As a teacher, he’d had an enhanced criminal record check because he was working with vulnerable people. He presumed that everyone has the same check; James knew they don’t.

‘On application forms, hopeful people, in the UK, must confess to any convictions within the last ten years. After ten years, their records are deleted, and they are considered reformed and no longer a threat to themselves, the shop-keepers’ sweets, or other people. Actually’, James continued, ‘the records are not deleted. Convictions for most offences are simply not revealed when requested by a potential employer, except for certain crimes.’

Brian looked uncomfortable at this, inconveniently sure that young criminals were eternally doomed and condemned to be forever unemployed by their foolish earlier actions. By this time in the conversation, James knew that Brian, the ex-teacher, still foolishly believed that education universally solves unemployment in all environments, and is the sole and absolute requirement for opportunities for success to emerge. Brian, born in the North East of England has lived in the south of England for too long, and, in James’ mind had forgotten his home. When James added that as an employer, he had worked closely with recruitment agencies to get people at very short notice for some of his contracts, Brian’s spluttering, pollution-spreading engine of a mind encountering a steep incline in the road to progress, switched on the automatic choke because its core temperature still remained too low, and so more stale fuel from his tank of denial was sucked in, at the expense of fresh air. He refused to learn something new or believe that he was wrong. He did not recognise that he needed to purge his system.

Brian shifted back to talking about food banks, believing that it was, in fact, James who was clearly exhibiting signs of mental disorder, and he tried to link education, criminality, and poverty with a circumstance he had read about and seen on the news. From his self-imposed, though much supported by his peers, elevated position of superiority over mentally aberrant individuals, such as this moron before him, he thought that James would agree with his confused and blind belief that all visitors to food banks are food-poor. ‘How can he not see the truth? It is in the newspapers, for goodness sake!’, he irately pondered.

However, when Brian demonstrated this fabricated empathy for peasants living on bread and water, James had to make sure Brian knew that many of them indeed eat cake. He had attended a food bank perhaps five times over as many years. Extra money went out as a larger direct debit than he was anticipating and five more times because he was ineffective in temporarily saving money by switching utility providers.

‘As someone interested in social enterprises, I spent a lot of hours talking to the organisers of local food banks and hubs.’ James explained. ‘All of them complained about rising numbers and how to tax people with a set ‘donation’ of around five pounds for each visit. My input with them was, as a general rule, to not allow people to attend if their benefit is paid that same week.’

James was now beginning to reveal his ruthlessness, but he knew that the same people week after week were getting free food so they could buy luxuries such as eating out and expensive day-trips with the money they saved. This at the expense of both the needy and the food-hubs which spent money on food to accommodate the greedy as well as the hungry.

‘Shame on them’, he said again.

Brian, in his turn, was irritated by James’ arrogance and finally ended the conversation when James tried to explain how needs and wants change as people mature, so financial income has a different utility for different age groups.

‘I really must get on with painting this shed. My wife will kill me if I waste this paint.’

James turned his bike around. A duck in the pond laughed when a jackdaw who had delightedly watched the whole thing called, ‘Hear! Hear!’.

Brian blinked and stared, confounded, and watched, paint pot in one hand and brush in the other, while James pushed his bicycle away, towards the gate at the edge of the allotment and back to the road.More cars were parked at the gate.

James, alone with his thoughts again, was convinced that he had proved himself right. Students really are held back by coasting teachers. Yet, blindly, he had corrupted himself because he had no evidence to back this up. It was still supposition. Nonetheless, he closed his thought-experiment examination of teacher and pupil interaction, and added one more theory to his collection of completed thoughts.

The duck, unable to keep the smile off its face, put its head beneath the water, then needing air, withdrew it,  shook it, and laughed again when the jackdaw flew away.

Blog address for all the posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

[ 18 minute read ]

This is a framework of a story I came up with which I used to explain three types of competition in economics. It begins with a family of weavers of fine wool carpets, who own their own sheep, in the 14th century Indus Valley, India. I had to learn about sheep to help me understand markets! Please help yourself to the ideas and the explanations.

The actual interaction between the characters, you will have to imagine for yourself.

Three types of competition: pure, imperfect, and monopoly.

If there were once four siblings who were all taught by their parents how to make fine carpets in the Indus valley, in 14^th century India, the same way, to the same design, and with the same dyed wool from their own sheep, and sold these carpets in the market place in the village square alongside their father and mother at such a low price that no-one else could make a profit selling carpets in the village, that family would have a monopoly selling carpets in that village. 

If, in the region in which their village lay, there were sixteen other carpet makers who were also sheep owners and wool spinners, and they produced carpets to designs that very closely resembled the designs of the two parents and their four offspring, and sold their carpets at a very close price to each other, and no-one else in the region could match their prices there would be perfect competition. Perfect or pure competition is when a firm producing near identical goods to its competitors, has some control over its prices. Since all these producers or families have vertically integrated businesses the barrier to entry into their market is high to carpet makers who own no sheep and cannot process wool. These new carpet markets wanting to enter the market would need to buy wool either locally or from further afield, and the original producers could sell their carpets at below the production costs, including the cost of wool, that new entrants to the market would necessarily have to pay. Most importantly here, is we must realise that no-one is getting rich in this regional community; they are only taking the opportunity to make sufficient money to feed the family members and care for their sheep (sustenance farming and production).

Two marriages and worrying times

If two daughters of one of the sixteen competitors married into our first described family there would be extra mouths to feed there, notwithstanding that a dowry would go along with the brides because they were considered to be a drain on resources in ancient civilisations, as in, take my hungry, weak and useless daughters away. This dowry could well be a bunch of sheep going along with each bride. What we have now is a larger flock of sheep owned by our first family AND two extra very capable shepherdesses with sticks, who are also wool carders, spinners, dyers, and weavers. Three outcomes can occur, 

a) the quantity of extra sheep provides only sufficient revenue to continue to live hand-to-mouth for a household of, now eight people;

b) each of these newly married brothers go off with their brides and their new sheep and produce carpets to the same design elsewhere in the region; or 

c) these two brothers and their wives go off, taking their sheep with them, and make carpets to a new design elsewhere in the region.

Solutions, but it won't be easy

a) despite there being a larger quantity of carpets available for sale by one whole larger family it only fills the gap left by the lessened production of the families from whence the brides came; and these families have less sheep to produce wool. There is no change to the market in terms of supply or demand, no riches made and no competitive edge is manifested. Nonetheless, this family of eight would have a larger share of the carpet market in their village.

b) the supply of carpets in the village is reduced as a result that our first family has lost key workers when the brothers depart, yet the quantity of raw material, being the original remaining sheep, stays the same (the same number as there were before the two brothers left, taking their hungry mouths with them – and their wives). Now, there is a surplus of sheep and not enough people to process their wool, or there is a surplus of wool and not enough people to process it into carpets. In any case, either the sheep are sold or the wool is sold. In the first case, there is an opportunity for a new entrant to the market to set up a virtually integrated business by purchasing sheep; or in the latter, a business buying wool to make carpets to a new and exciting design that competes in the same market square in the village as the plain and similar designs already sold there. Nothing has really changed by the entrance of a new design until the old carpet producers recognise that the demand for the new design is undermining the demand for their plain designs. At this time, some of the existing carpet makers may change their designs to represent their family history. This is product differentiation. Now, in the market square there are many different and exciting designs and the beginning of brand awareness and brand loyalty (initially through family connections with one or other family of carpets makers). This is monopolistic competition. Monopolistic because the designs represent individual families and their ancestors and no-one else will ever make the same designs; doing so would disparage their own family and ancestors. Yet there is still competition in the market sector.

c) the two brothers, their wives, with their dowry sheep, form a collective and farm the same area. They have to because they cannot care for the sheep, shear the sheep (actually primitive sheep had wool that could just be pulled off (by ‘rooing’), wash, card, spin, and weave the wool into carpets, and sell the carpets in their newly found village market square when they are existing only as two pairs of people. Such is the lack of labour, this band of carpet producers, recognising that a good design sells well in another market, weave carpets to a design that has vivid colours that deeply contrast, but due to time constraints and lack of labour settle on designs apropos to nothing; one that any carpet maker could easily copy or use as a design idea (deeply contrasting colours). When other carpet makers produce similar carpets to the brothers and their wives, there is perfect competition, where a large number of small firms supply an identical product. In this example, identical means vivid contrasting colours apropos to nothing in wool carpets.

Sibling Rivalry Aside

As yet, there is nothing to propel a producer into having an advantage; there are no real constraints in design, no recognised regulations, and no changes in efficiency or production costs.

However, when the two brother’s parents die, their two unmarried brothers who were living with their parents have, now surplus, sheep and wool that could be sold as carpets but would provide more than enough money for two mouths, if they could only process it and have the time to sell it. They could sell the sheep, sell the wool, or form a company with their married brothers and their wives to make only the new and exciting carpet designs, which sell really well but so far lack brand awareness and brand loyalty.

So far no change, you think, this is simply going back to six mouths to feed (four brothers and two wives instead of two parents and four brothers). Yet the dowry has swelled the flock in two distinct ways; by direct addition; and by husbandry.

Numbers in this example are kept to a value that is easily understood. Ten ewes and one ram will typically produce ten lambs per year, which can be sheared / (rooed) to keep them cool in hot weather. When the lambs are two thirds of their adult size/weight they can be tupped or mated. This could be when they are one year old to give birth when they are eighteen months old, but more likely on poor soil and with primitive sheep, tupped when they are two years old and birthing at two and a half. But let’s say there are lambs every year. (for ease of counting and multiplication)

Yet, by the addition of four more ewes as two dowries, two more female and two more male lambs could be born.

Without eating any, and with impressive shepherding and predator deterrents, and no other losses, the original flock of eleven in the year 1300, (ten ewes and one ram), with each ewe producing one lamb a year, could in six years time (1306 AD) be a flock of:

30 new ewes from the original ten ewes (and 30 male) Total 60 lambs were born

Born in 1301 AD and tupped in 1303 AD, five ewes being the first home generation would produce in 1304 – 1306 AD perhaps two or three female lambs in each year (total 7 of each sex over three years)

Born in 1305 AD to the first home generation two or three ewes in 1305 would be tupped and produce one or two lambs in 1306 AD

- making a total of 35 new ewes ready for tupping in 1306 AD and thirty nine male lambs that have been for the cooking pot over six years

plus the ten original ewes equals 45 ewes ready for tupping in 1306 AD

With four extra ewes (dowries) there is the immediate addition of four ?fleeces and then:

2 new female lambs from the dowry ewes (and 2 male) every year for six years (total of 12 lambs of each sex)

1 new female lamb born each year in 1303 AD to 1306 AD from the first dowry ewe’s offspring every year (total of 4 lambs of each sex over three years)

The flock size is now 69, including the original 11 and 4 dowry ewes. Unfortunately, a ram cannot service this many in a short period and it is preferable to have lambs born in safe seasonal weather so there needs to be three rams for this flock size (so a bit less to eat for the owners then) which makes the whole flock size 72 sheep, twenty one of these ewes are four dowry ewes and their seventeen descendants.

In reality, ewes about to give birth experience a reduction in immunity to internal parasites and die or give birth to stillborns. Increasing the size of a flock will not change the incidence of this type of death. However, increasing the size of a flock will reduce the percentage of losses to predators, yet, will require greater shepherding with big sticks. So, here, there is a human resource problem that could inhibit flock size. On top of that is the ground and area on which a flock feeds which may support a specific flock size but cannot also provide the extra nutrition that ewes need in the final month of gestation (Approximately 70 percent of fetal growth occurs during the last month of pregnancy). So, nutrition is a contributing factor in inhibiting flock size.

Time to say goodbye

The four brothers and the two wives cannot hope to increase their market share if they all live in the same village with the same pasture. So, their market share remains the same in their respective villages. However, we have a workforce of six young persons and a large area of grazing, separated into two, which was not available in the same quantity or quality as when there was two parents and four brothers. Furthermore, there are more sheep to breed from (dowry) and a larger quantity of lambs born per year on a wider pasture to the same number of people with hungry mouths; these mouths and stomachs are now better satiated by eating the respectively larger quantity of male lambs. Hence, there is a surplus of raw material (sheep as ewes) that will eventually be constrained by land and nutrition resources.

The 'Six'

We might look at this as the four brothers and two wives (‘The Six’) having a reduction of average costs; but since this is a vertically integrated business we are primarily considering the reduction in opportunity cost until we realise that already the six people are fully occupied in husbandry and wool processing, so there is no reduction of human interaction or no spare time. Or, we could consider an economy of scale; but there would now need to be employees to add to the already overwhelmed labour resource. Luckily for ‘The Six’, because no-one could enter the same perfect market as they and their competitors, there are available workers in both villages who could be paid to process wool, or the surplus wool can be sold off cheap to them to process for themselves. This is the stage at which sustenance farming changes into specialised jobs within an industry. The brothers may fight the sheep predators, grab handfuls of wool (rooing), and weave and sell carpets while the wives and workers process the wool and also weave carpets. As long as the production costs do not rise too significantly the rate at which ‘The Six’ can produce funky carpets will increase. This is an example of an economy of scale because the unit cost is reduced, but only in terms of opportunity cost. However, specialised focus on a single task brings about faster production and superior quality products as aptitude for a task is better utilised and experience grows more rapidly. However, there is an attendant cost of wages for extra workers in this example. Faster processing from developed skill-sets may cover the wage costs and result in higher carpet production rates, thereby reducing overall costs.

Where there is a competitive advantage, such as an economy of scale, a perfect market is destroyed and an imperfect market takes its place. An economy of scale that cannot be matched is a barrier to entry in the market.

In addition to declining costs, other barriers leading to imperfect competition are legal restrictions, (patents or government regulation), high entry costs, advertising, and product differentiation.

In this whole example, towards the beginning, we have a loyal customer base buying traditionally crafted carpets from separate families who design and make carpets specific to their family ancestors, with each family making a different design. This means that the producers could set their own price as their carpet is somewhat more or less desirable to a buyer than a competitor’s as the buyer’s loyalty wins out. A new design with a strong contrast of colours entered the market as a free-to-purchase item with no guilt attached to the buyer. Then ‘The Six’ produced the funky carpets in high volume in two villages. Because the same funky designs are available in two villages advertising at no financial cost is established. A buyer can buy a carpet made by ‘The Six’ closer to their home and more people, as visitors, will see those carpets, especially when the carpets are taken out of the home to be beaten outside. 

Of course, in 14^th century India not many people travelled beyond the next village. However, in a city, just like the prevalence of sheep in remote areas, the more incidences of something the greater the multiplication of reproduction. So, more incidences of funky carpets creates a wider reproduction of wondrous perception and experience in passers-by or home visitors.

Positive and Negative Transfer Effects

In Psychology, there is something known as the ‘negative transfer effect’. Rudimentally, this means that given a problem to solve, there is a set of rules that someone has learnt, or internally adheres to in their general life, that may inhibit a successful solution being found, because those rules are so fixed in the individual that lateral thinking, or thinking outside the box, does not occur to them. To even think, ‘Ah ha! I need to think laterally here!’ would actually negate this ‘negative transfer effect’; but only if knowing that thinking outside the box might give an appropriate solution is a norm for an individual. Get it? Anyone who normally thinks outside the box is not already hindered. However, if wild and lateral thinking is the norm for an individual, following a linear series of steps to solve a problem can be difficult. Some people with a good understanding of mathematics struggle to pass a ‘Functional Maths’ Level Two exam. In case you don’t know what that is; it is approximately the level of a nine year old primary school child in the UK.

Someone I know has a nickname, slightly contemptuous, I suppose, for a work colleague, ‘word count’. I am told that ‘word count’ will use five words when one will do. I think that there may be an inherent mental health issue at play here. I think this chap is probably talking around a subject and landing on each facet of the topic, which to him, needs mentioning; quite simply because they are fascinating to him, or maybe they are just awkward stumbling blocks which need to be dismantled by spoken dissemination.

Someone with Macular Degeneration, a vision problem that affects how the central part of an image is perceived, sees only the periphery around a blind or blurred central spot. There may be blurred or no vision in the centre of their visual field. To have some understanding of what this may be like we might, ourselves, try to see in very low light conditions. We have cells in our eyes; rods and cones. The cones ‘see’ colour and are important to us during strong light conditions. The rods in the human eye are most sensitive to light but generally, are located in a ring around the cones; so a doughnut (Am. ‘donut’) shape. This means that often the best impression of something we want to see in low light conditions is gained by looking slightly to one side or above or below the object. In other words, you can’t look ‘at’ it. Human night-vision is also in black and white and devoid of colour.

The Secretarybird, found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, is a predator, resembling an eagle on very long, stork-like legs; reaching up to 1.3 metres tall. It likes to eat snakes and small animals and hunts on the ground. It uses its sharp vision to find its prey by walking about a location and jerking its head about in different directions, seeking movement. It turns its head and focuses; turns its head and focuses, and then moves to a new spot; even returning to a rock or bush it had only just been to.

Now. Let us intermesh our limited understanding of how the person suffering with macular degeneration sees; what we see in the dark; and how the Secretarybird stares, focuses, and analyses each rock or bush; then moves on to the next. Let us also consider how my friend’s colleague ‘word-count’ communicates. Are they not the same? Each one of the entities used as examples for how vision is used have no choice in the application of their specific visual acuity, and word-count, much like a Secretarybird has great focus, but is compelled to examine each ‘rock’ before the whole landscape is understood or described. Perhaps, for ‘Word-count, the central image or focus is not available to him, and the shape of the concept is explained instead. It is also possible that that he is secretly in love with my acquantance and babbles, or he is teaching himself as he speaks, by assembling a construct of ideas.

Word-count’s passion and confusion aside, we might say that these entities have hard-wired systems. These hard-wired systems are far-removed from thought processes that result from experience because experience is mutable; it grows with each new experience; at least it should. The only resemblance is; experience could, disastrously, result in an heuristic, or rule of thumb, that is taken by the individual to be a hard-wired process of problem-solving. It is the past experience of an individual that generally determines how that individual approaches problem-solving. ‘Good at problem-solving’ on your CV doesn’t really mean anything, does it? It just means that you solved problems once upon a time, yet you may well have a fixed mind-set.

We can see how the negative transfer effect is demonstrated if, at a high street jewellers, the door from the high street opens differently to how high street shop doors normally open. There are videos on YouTube that show thieves giving up trying to escape a jewellers because they are trying to force the doors outwards, when they should have just gently pulled the unlocked doors inwards. Certainly, in England, we normally push the door to enter the shop and pull the door to leave the shop. When doors operate like this, a thief needs to spend more time to leave the shop with swag, because a full pelt run comes to a full stop in order to be able to pull on the door’s handle. That, however, is not the reason why our doors open like this; it is so pedestrians, passing the shop, don’t get hit in the face with an opening door.

Now we understand how a movement from one position, circumstance, or situation may smoothly transgress into, what may seem to the character in a story to be serendipitous, and a reader may just follow that rule of one state of being smoothly passing into another – the door opens inwards so the passage from outside to inside is barely slowed, or the transition from stranger to acqauintance is merely a few shared words of commonality. Withdrawing from an environment (or shop) or a situation, however, usually requires a pause if a threshold is actually crossed and the ‘door’ closed, before escape is fully achieved. An individual may create a pause in the movement of another character merely by saying, ‘One moment’, or ‘ Wait!’, or ‘I…’, or any other utterance, and then may say, ‘Never mind’, or shake their head once, left and right, as they, mirroring the movement, gently swat the air with a flat hand. This is akin to the pause before the door opens to leave the shop, environment, or circumstance. This would create a level of tension between people or characters in a story, especially if no other words, notably, went between them beforehand.

So far, we have looked at the positive transfer effect; in that all the action and interaction follows a standard format and one circumstance naturally flows into another. A child, without having fully formed a honed set of heuristics to use as a template to test the world, will not be at all surprised if one of the characters in a book, or an individual in their scope of perception, suddenly acts weirdly. One of the characters or individuals would only need to glance over their shoulder as they leave the presence of another, and an adult reader or viewer may infer that something is afoot; a child, however, may only understand that a character looked at another character or person. Fundamentally, there is no pause if two characters are in a open space and it is only distance that shall, or does, determine separation between these characters. So, a wide-open space with no hindrances that cause a delay in movement has only potential for a fading relationship between people. By fading, I mean there is an absence of finality. Typically, in films the viewer sees this as one person in a nascent romantic relationship running after the other as they tearfully leave town, never to return again. ‘Well, go get him!’ Of course, their relationship may instead continue to cook on the proverbial back-burner. One of these participants may even thwart a mutually attractive and symbiotic future relationship by fantasing a future and inadvertently using this fantasy as a false memory that is then egregiously considered, by them, to be a real experience. Just consider jealousy, for example. A pause, as the threshold of possible social interaction and improbable social interaction is actually crossed, creates a world of possibilities in a relationship between people, but there must be a clearly defined threshold.

A simplified scene of two people without embellishment or style:

‘Goodbye’.

‘Goodbye’.

Martin turned and began to walk away.

‘I…I..No’.

The distance between them grew.

Now the same scene without the pause.

‘Goodbye’.

‘Goodbye’.

Martin turned and began to walk away. The distance between them grew.

Positive and negative transfer is within the field of associative learning. For most of us, one set of problems were solved in a particular way, and that ‘way’ becomes for us our ‘way’ of doing things. My wife would call this her ‘inimicable style’. In an exclusively visual world, she would have been wearing an ‘L’ plate (from the ‘L’ that learner drivers place on their vehicles to designate their status as being inexperienced). But, in explaining experience, I am not seeking to portray a character’s style or personality in a story; I want to understand people’s fallibility; their inability to easily open the proverbial door; the fumble; the hesitation; not the covert look, but instead the unguarded and accidental look. Real people do not flow from one environment to another without a slip. There is an incongruity about them. From the two scenes above; we know that the Martin in the first scene is human because we have learnt that only humans talk and there is the expectation that it is Martin who turns and speaks; because that is our experience of how books are written; unless it is otherwise clearly stated, the last person mentioned is the owner of the next piece of speech. In the same scene above but without speech, the ‘distance’ could be attributed to the enlarging geographical space between Martin and the other character, or it could be an opening intangible chasm that serves to separate their future relationship. Yet, there may be a third character AND Martin might instead be a dog or other walking entity. Of course, it is implied that there are only two humans and no other entities; but that is only implication which works on our shared understanding of normal practice.

Here then, in the example above, is an example of the positive transfer effect being upset by a new perspective, which jolts our perception into an unconscious recognition of our fallibility to correctly understand a scenario. In effect, the possibility of not understanding the scope of the scene is an example of negative transfer – believing things happen this way and only this way, and we are later shown to be wrong or are given conflicting information.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t realise that our experience binds and circumscribes our understanding of a situation. Our perception is working fine, but it is compromised by our experience, and, in many cases, not by our complete lack of experience. Strangely, zero experience often trumps some experience; and a great deal of experience from different perspectives indubitably trumps only some experience. We might know this as: ‘ A little bit of knowledge is worse than none at all’. A little bit of knowledge, or experience, prevents us from approaching an operation with fresh eyes, and so a toolbox of unfettered, and uncluttered, set of possibilities is not available to us. Let us not forget, though, that all of us need to be shown how to do things; we cannot expect wolves to raise our children in the forest, and then expect the children to be able to use cutlery to feed themselves in a restaurant.

Positive and Negative Framing

This cognitive bias can be expressed in terms of stating information with a positive or negative slant; the result, nonetheless, being the same for either choosing one solution to a problem over another. Simply, and loosely: ‘This medicine saves 80% of the sufferers of a disease’, is positive framing. ‘This medicine cannot save 20% of the sufferers of a disease’, is negative framing. This, though, is a very simplistic approach is showing how describing something differently creates different expectations in the minds of recipients of information.

Let us delve into this a little more. In buying a second-hand motorcycle, a group of friends went separately to try to buy the motorcycle as cheaply as they could. The person in the group who was to be the owner of the motorbike went first to try it out. The advertised price was £200. The seller, was the father of the owner of the motorcycle. The father was not a fan of motorbikes. An offer of £170 was made with a determination that a good price to pay would be £180. The offer was refused. Next, a series of friends went and made lower offers; £120; £140; and £130; each of which were refused. Finally, the last friend went to view the motorbike and offered £170 again, with the authority to pay £180. The offer of £170 was accepted. Each of the lower offers served to positively frame the original offer. The same amount was accepted from the last friend because the seller’s expectaction was that only low offers would follow. This is positively framing.

It is possible; indeed, I heard this is true, that Vladamir Putin, at election times, similarly set up opposing political parties that faded into obscurity or had obvious failings, to positively frame his own political position.

In business, an unscrupulous entrepreneur may set up, perhaps, five businesses in the same industry; all of them viable. However, only one of these businesses is the true focus of the entrepreneur’s attention. If these five businesses take up five of the first page of Google listing and four of the websites offer a poor service; five competitors cannot occupy those slots on the first page and one of the websites out of the five will be more favourable than the other four ‘practically psuedo’ businesses. This could, by extension, be an example, if conducted well, of both negatively framing competitors’ businesses, while at the same time positively framing one of the five businesses operated by the unscrupulous entrepreneur. One might not be surprised to discover that Unilever owns around about two-thirds of the businesses that make the butter-like spreads in a UK supermarket fridge. The unscrupulous businessman with five businesses with five separate web pages on the first page of a Google listing is not at all dissimilar. The difference is, though, that the dastardly cad is attempting to use some of the webpages to negatively frame its competitors. You may well find, without too much scrutiny, evidence of such behaviour in modern marketing; it is, however, only a very recent slide into devilishly unfair tactics.

In marketing, there is something known as, ‘Collusive Bidding’. It is banned in the UK. Essentially, there would be a cartel of businesses who take it in turns to bid for a contract, much in the way of a ‘Dutch Auction’. One of the businesses in the cartel puts in a lower bid, still high but lower. Mostly, they get the contract. When a business in a cartel has a slack period of activity, that is the one which ‘gets’ the contract. Because, there are extremely heavy penalties for this type of activity, there is a strong compulsion for a competitor to report this nefarious activity.

A wily person can negatively frame other job interviewees by speaking in the negative, such as; ‘I don’t go home until the task is done’. This suggests that other people will leave work unfinished for their own selfish ends. This tactic used to work – except now, job interviewers want to establish that the potential employee will have a good work/life balance (It is good for the hiring business, due to it avoiding employee mental ill-health caused by too much work). Now, I suppose, one needs to exhibit robustness in job interviews. Ultimately, the interviewee, by default, frames their own application positively.

Bibliography

National Geographic, Secretarybirds,

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/facts/secretary-bird

Accessed 03 February 2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)