Dust and the American West
Images of deserts in the United States show dusty, barren landscapes, but the land may not always have been this way. Ever since settlers moved west across the US there have been dust-clouds of it everywhere. It was part of the landscape, or so it seemed to them. But there were no records of the landscape of the West until the settlers arrived. Now evidence is starting to emerge which suggests that before the settlers, there was very little dust.
The evidence comes from the San Juan mountains of southwest Colorado, downwind of Arizona and New Mexico. There Jason Neff, a geochemist from the University of Colorado, has been analyzing sediments, the sand, stones and mud, laid down over the past 5000 years. Atmospheric dust was minimal throughout those five millennia until the mid-19th century, he says, but then, 'from about 1860 to 1900, dust deposition rates shot up.'
This is surprising because usually dry means dusty, and the American West has almost always been dry — often drier than today. There was a near-permanent drought between 900 and 1300 which was so intense that it destroyed a series of native American civilisations, including the Anasazi, whose cliff homes are now national treasures. Yet the evidence from the San Juan lakes is that it was not dusty. Even as their civilisation was collapsing, the Anasazi seem to have protected their soils from erosion.
This was not the case with the European settlers once they brought their cows. The landscape the cattle were introduced to was remarkably ill-equipped to cope with grazing animals, says Neff. 'Unlike most other parts of the US, there were few grazers in the American Southwest until the Europeans came. No bison and few antelope or deer.'
In the Great Plains to the east and north, bison roamed in vast herds. Their regular grazing had created tough grass, while the herds manured the soil. In the Southwest, the land had few defences against a sudden invasion of millions of livestock, whose teeth stripped the grass and whose hooves punctured the hard crust of desert soils that protected them from the wind. The invasion was sudden, funded by a bubble of speculative investment, much of it from Britain. The money went into railroads, and herds of cattle and sheep that rode the rails to the wide open pastures. By 1900, when sedimentation rates peaked, there were 20 million cattle and 25 million sheep in the West.
One of the biggest ranches was owned by the Aztec Land and Cattle Company, which owned a million acres of land by 1884. Each acre had cost the company a mere 50 cents, and like many other speculators, it was only interested in quick profits and had little incentive to protect the land from overgrazing. By the time Aztec sold the ranch in 1901, it was an ecological disaster. The land was stripped bare, and wind erosion had taken hold on a massive scale. This pattern was repeated across the region.
The consequences were severe. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s, which devastated the Great Plains, was partly a product of this earlier degradation combined with drought and poor farming practices. The legacy of dust continues to affect the region today, influencing air quality, soil fertility, and water availability. Modern conservation efforts aim to restore damaged grasslands and implement sustainable grazing practices, but the evidence from the San Juan sediments serves as a stark reminder of how quickly human activity can transform a landscape and create an environmental legacy that lasts for centuries.
A Study of Introvert and Extrovert Characters
A We are often labelled as introverts or extroverts, and humans do seem to have biological propensities to behave in certain ways; some of us are naturally more talkative and sociable while others prefer more time alone. But, according to Canadian-born research psychologist Professor Brian Little, our traits are by no means fixed. In his book Me, Myself and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being, Little suggests that we are often able to override our biological make-up through the adoption of what he calls 'free-traits', which allow us to behave in a manner which contrasts with our natural selves. According to Little, we adopt these free-traits only when we need them, in order to meet the demands of different situations and reach targets and goals that are important to us — our 'persona projects'. These projects might be big (such as career ambitions) or small (like cleaning the car) and pursuing them shapes our day-to-day behaviour and our relationships with friends, family and workmates.
B Little recommends that we might usefully think of ourselves as amateur scientists. We are continually exploring and testing the world around us to discover what works and what doesn't. We do things, say things, and then we observe the reactions and unconsciously store the results. We apply the knowledge gained from our 'experiments' to the advancement of our personal projects. Sometimes our personal project pursuit requires us to engage in free-traits; at other times, we can just be ourselves. Little proposes that the successful pursuit of personal projects which are meaningful, manageable, supported by others and generate positive feelings can greatly impact our happiness and the quality of our lives.
C Professor Little and one of his graduate students, Sanna Balsari-Palsule, have looked into the experiences of employees in a range of organisations. The reason for basing the research on this environment, as Balsari-Palsule explains, is that 'in an ideal world, one's job would fit one's traits perfectly, but that's very rarely the case. As so much can hinge on how we behave with others while at work, I wanted to discover what happens when people push the limits of their ability to act out of character. Do employees experience detriments in their well-being or work performance and does this increase their chances of burnout?'
D Their findings suggest that extroverts initially experience advantages over introverts at work, in terms of getting noticed and promoted more rapidly. However, when introvert employees higher up in the organisation act out of character and take on extrovert traits, they have equal performance ratings to those extroverts, and do not report any negative effects of this use of free-traits. Balsari-Palsule offers an explanation: introvert employees make frequent use of 'restorative resources'. These are spaces designed to allow employees to read quietly or simply relax in order to recover their equilibrium after a strenuous session of acting out of character that would otherwise leave them feeling drained. However, if the same employees were expected to act out of character for more prolonged periods, without the chance to recover, the benefits could quickly turn into costs.
E In the same study, however, extroverts report strikingly different, and much less rewarding, experiences of acting out of character. It appears that more outwardly confident personality types find it extremely hard — and stressful — to rein back their personalities and act as if they were introverted. 'We found this difference was most common among younger employees. It may be that introverts are generally so used to acting extrovertedly in situations outside of the workplace that it becomes a relatively easy force of habit, particularly in Western cultures where extroversion is often highly valued. On the other hand, extrovert employees at the beginning of their careers are much less used to being isolated in an office for long periods of time, so may feel like caged animals, needing to feed off the energy of others in order to thrive,' says Balsari-Palsule.
F In the second stage of research, Balsari-Palsule is looking into the idiosyncrasies of people's work projects and how the work environment plays a vital role in supporting or, in some cases, constraining them. For example, highly competitive environments, which place demands on employees to conform to certain types of behaviour, may leave little time for employees to pursue projects which are important to them on a personal level. This could eventually be detrimental to their well-being. She expects that a closer look at the influences of different factors in the work environment, in conjunction with how people behave, will shed more light on what acting out of character may lead to.
G The implications of Little and Balsari-Palsule's research are numerous and need to be taken into account by businesses. Balsari-Palsule suggests that it would serve companies well not to dismiss the costs of free-trait acting. She points out that compromised psychological and physical well-being can quickly result in more frequent occurrences of absenteeism. She also believes that management should rely less on handing out personality surveys that pigeonhole employees into introvert and extrovert categories. Instead, organisations should adopt policies and build work environments that are supportive of free-trait expression, and also provide the spaces for people to be themselves. Furthermore, making these changes is also likely to lead to increases in productivity in the long run.
The Art of Deception
Do tiny changes of facial expression show whether someone is telling lies?
Forty years ago, the research psychologist Dr Paul Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists in training when he was asked a question, the answer to which has kept him busy ever since. Suppose, the group wanted to know, a particular patient swears they are telling the truth. They look and sound sincere. So here is the question: is there any way you can be sure they are telling the truth? Ekman did not know the answer then, but wanted to find out.
As part of his research, he had already filmed a series of 12-minute interviews with psychiatric patients. In a subsequent conversation, one of the patients told him that she had lied to him. So Ekman sat and looked at the film but saw nothing noteworthy. Then he slowed it down and looked again. Then he slowed it even further. And suddenly, there, across just two frames of the film, he saw it: an intense expression of extreme anguish. It lasted less than a 15th of a second, but once he had spotted the first expression, he soon found three more examples in that same interview. He termed his discovery 'micro-expressions': very rapid, intense demonstrations of emotion that the subject intended to be concealed.
Over the course of the next four decades, Ekman successfully demonstrated a proposition first suggested by Charles Darwin: that the ways in which we express rage, disgust, contempt, fear, surprise, happiness, and sadness are universal. The facial muscles triggered by those seven basic emotions are, he has shown, essentially standard, regardless of language and culture, from the US to Japan, and Brazil to Papua New Guinea. What is more, expressions of emotion are impossible to suppress and, particularly when we are lying, micro-expressions of powerfully felt emotions will inevitably flit across our faces before we get the chance to stop them.
Fortunately for liars, most people will fail to spot these fleeting signals of inner torment. Of the 15,000 Ekman has tested, only 50 people, whom he calls 'naturals', have been able to do it. But given a little more training, Ekman says, almost anyone can develop the skill. He should know: since these tests were complete in the mid-1980s and the first publication of his research, he has been called in by the FBI and CIA (among countless more law-enforcement and other agencies around the world), not just to solve cases, but to teach them how to use his technique for themselves. He has held workshops for defence and prosecution lawyers, health professionals, even jealous spouses, all of them wanting to know exactly when someone is not being 100 per cent candid.
Most recently, Ekman's research has resulted in a new television series about the exploits of the fictional Dr Cal Lightman, a scientist who studies involuntary body language to discover not only if you are lying, but why you have been motivated to do so. According to the publicity blurb, Lightman is a 'human lie detector', even more accurate than a polygraph test. Ekman concedes he was sceptical when the producer first approached him with the idea of turning his life's work into a TV series, and initially would have stopped the project if he could. In particular, he was fearful that the show would exaggerate the effectiveness of his techniques and create the quite inaccurate impression among audiences that criminals could no longer hope to get away with lying. In the worst case scenario, he was concerned about unfair convictions: that one day someone not properly trained in his techniques might be sitting on a jury and wrongly find someone guilty of a crime simply on the basis of a television programme.
In the end though, he was won over because the series is unusual in several respects. It is the first time, as far as Ekman is aware, that a commercial TV drama has been based on the work of just one scientist. That scientist is also deeply involved in the project, talking through plot ideas and checking five successive drafts of each script to ensure details are correct. He was also impressed with the producer's manifestly serious and well-intentioned reasons for making the programme. Now that the first series has been completed, he believes probably 80–90 per cent of the show is based on fact, and that's good enough for what is, after all, a drama, not a documentary.
Ekman, incidentally, professes to have been a terrible liar ever since he was a small boy and observes that the ability to detect a lie and the ability to lie successfully are completely unrelated. He has been asked by people running for high office if he could teach them to become 'more credible' with the public, but has always refused to use his skills in that way on ethical grounds. He also insists that there are various kinds of lies. A 'true' lie can be identified by having two essential characteristics: there must be a deliberate intent to mislead and there must be no notification that this is what is occurring. This means that an actor or a poker player isn't a true liar. They're supposed to be deceiving you, it's part of the game, and the same is true of flattery. He prefers to focus on the kinds of lies where the liar would be in grave trouble if they were found out, and where the target would feel properly aggrieved if they knew.
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