Ecology & Geology: The world is my lab, the world is my oyster

I've been taking a closer look at different scientific fields recently. I'm trying to develop a better sense of how they differ from each other. I think the layman often thinks of scientific research in a generic sense, not really appreciating how techniques and lifestyle vary across fields. This was (and probably still is) me. But I think even professional researchers are often so involved in their own work that they don't develop a sense of how things differ in other contexts.

Today I was delving into the world of practicing ecologists. It doesn't exactly come as a surprise that they appear to place particular value on freedom, mobility and working outside. This impression comes primarily from the ecology subreddit. Among the commenters we have:

• An environmental consultant who works on wetland delineations, threatened and endangered species surveys, habitat assessments, etc.
• A postdoc who's following up two weeks of field work with two years of computer work and who values the outdoor lifestyle, creativity and mobility afforded to those with an MS in biology or ecology
• An arborist who spends a lot of time climbing trees and describes it as the "best job ever"

This probably has something to do with natural environments serving as the ecologist's "lab". That stands in contrast to fields like biology, chemistry and physics, where more happens in a controlled environment. In that regard ecology reminds me of geology, which may be even more extreme when it comes to travel and working outdoors. It doesn't seem uncommon for geologists to spend a lot of time in the field searching for natural experiments and observing them. Geologists also appear to conduct some pretty sophisticated operations with heavy duty equipment, such as collecting cores and the like, which would make extensive field research that much more imperative.

Gaza and Israel, Russia and Ukraine: Illustrations of Risk-Eliminating Psychology

I often encounter blanket attitudes toward whole groups of people. Yesterday I was struck by a couple examples from an NPR article covering shifting attitudes of Israelis and Palestinians toward each other:

• An Israeli to a Palestinian: "Go away you trash. I would bury you in Gaza."
• A Palestinian: "Israeli Jews are bad human beings. They kill every day."

How could it be all members of an ethnicity are bad human beings, or deserve to be buried? People will argue the accuracy of their gross generalizations. Underneath their arguments, however, there's something actually worth considering: the psychology of group politics.

A number of studies have touched on the connection between neurology and political convictions. I've seen them best summarized here, but these ideas have popped up across popular media over the past couple years. Some notable conclusions are:

• Reliance on quick, efficient, and "low effort" thought processes yields conservative ideologies, while effortful and deliberate reasoning yields liberal ideologies.
• Liberals have more tolerance to uncertainty (bigger anterior cingulate cortex), and conservatives have more sensitivity to fear (bigger right amygdala).
• Republicans are more likely than Democrats to interpret faces as threatening and expressing dominant emotions, while Democrats show greater emotional distress and lower life satisfaction.
• Conservatism is focused on preventing negative outcomes, while liberalism is focused on advancing positive outcomes.
• Conservatives tend to have a stronger reaction to threatening noises and images than liberals.

The overarching theme is that the attitudes we associate with conservatism tend to arise more from fear than liberal attitudes do. Or, to invert the chicken and egg, fear lends itself to conservative thinking. That holds true in the literal sense of the word "conservative." Fear drives us to conserve our positions, to seek to eliminate risk.

This risk aversion is what's behind the overgeneralizing rhetoric around Gaza and Israel, Russia and Ukraine, and anytime and anywhere large scale conflict occurs. When someone says, "All these people are bad," I believe their brain has actually decided, "Some of these people might not be bad, but I associate enough risk with their group identity that I will act as though they all pose a threat to me."

If people were capable of expressing themselves in those terms, that latter sort of statement would allow for an honest conversation. It would allow for discussing whether that sort of risk-minimizing behavior is practical and ethical, instead of arguing over which ethnicities are good and which are evil.