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Though more advanced in execution, today’s electronic nudges and tweaks are identical in purpose: use what you can control to affect what you can’t. The simple elegance of this concept flips on its head Chomsky’s suggestion that behavior modification treats people as if they were no more intelligent than animals. What distinguishes our intellect from animals’ is not that we can go against our environment—most of us can’t, not in the long run—but rather that we can purposefully alter our environment to shape our behavior in ways we choose.
"So assuming you actually have a viable choice, the situations where it makes sense to reject religion in favor of far truth are extreme – either there are big personally-useful far contrarian claims to learn, or you have a good shot at being a rare far expert, respected by a community with truth-correlated standards. So if such extremes seem unlikely to you, far truth probably isn’t worth its costs to you."
Given 1. religious people tend to have better lives and 2. far beliefs, e.g. religion, have small effects on your life. Then why not believe in religion?
"Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people’s moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers’ moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philosophers and non-philosophers do indeed sometimes have different moral intuitions, but challenging the notion that philosophers have better or more reliable intuitions. "
Criticism of The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney
"For most of the 20th century, prisoners' stays in solitary confinement were relatively short. "People would get thrown in 'the hole' for a couple days at a time, maybe a couple weeks at a time," says Craig Haney, PhD, a social psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose research has explored the psychological effects of incarceration.
That's changed over the last two decades or so. "Now they're in the hole for years at a time," he says. Over the last 20 years, so-called "supermax" prisons have become increasingly popular. There, tens of thousands of inmates spend years locked in small cells for 23 to 24 hours a day.."
"We've put a self-perpetuating cycle in motion. The more anxious, isolated and time-deprived we are, the more likely we are to turn to paid personal services. To finance these extra services, we work longer hours."
"Consequently, operational closure need not be a tragic thesis that we are forever doomed to completely misunderstand one another. Our ability to enter into the world of others– animal, social, human, and technological –can grow and develop, even if it will never be complete."
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What Hume articulates here in the portion I have bolded is a variant of why, as Lacan liked to put it, all communication is miscommunication. Put in terms of the theory of relations between objects I advocate under the title of onticology, Hume is here articulating the principle of operational closure characteristic of all objects. Drawn from autopoietic theory but extended to all objects, autopoietic and allopoietic, operational closure is the idea that external stimuli do not determine internal states of an entity, but rather only trigger them. The determination of internal states in an entity results from the internal structure and dynamics unfolding within the object.
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The upshot of this is that our interpretations of others say more about us than they say about us. When we interpret another what we are doing is making a statement about the sort of things that would motivate us.
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It turned out that those subjects with a growth mindset were significantly better at learning from their mistakes. As a result, they showed a spike in accuracy immediately following an error. Most interesting, though, was the EEG data, which demonstrated that those with a growth mindset generated a much larger Pe signal, indicating increased attention to their mistakes. (While those with an extremely fixed mindset generated a Pe amplitude around five, those with a growth mindset were closer to fifteen.) What’s more, this increased Pe signal was nicely correlated with improvement after error, implying that the extra awareness was paying dividends in performance. Because the subjects were thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right.
"The troubling conclusion of a recent study by a team of social psychologists (including one of us, Sara Konrath) is that American college students have been scoring lower and lower on a standardized empathy test over the past three decades. "
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Educators less keen to blame politics for the decrease in student empathy might look to changes in the college-going population's relationship to work, family, and higher education. For example, many students plan to attend graduate or professional school, making their college years more of an extended adolescence than an emergence into early adulthood, and pushing forward the traditional markers of that transition—getting married and having children—by several years. Cultural trends also play a role. The popularization of reality TV shows and the narcissistic exhibitionists who star in them; the focus of primary education on the problem of low self-esteem rather than low empathy; and the relative decline of face-to-face interaction and emotional communication due to increased online socializing may all contribute to the decline of empathy among college students.
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Those who are most critical of the recent study's findings may be college students, who take them as an older generation's predictable complaints about "kids these days." It's true that such studies deal with averages distilled from very large numbers. Luckily, there are many highly empathetic young people who undertake projects like volunteering for altruistic reasons rather than for résumé-padding.
Instructors who wish to impart lessons about the nature of fairness, and its emotional and cognitive roots, must not forget that students are also taking mental notes as we, too, use or set aside our empathy muscles in our relationships with students. After all, it's hardest to empathize with those who don't reciprocate.
If empathy is truly on the decline among college students, then professors who care may be seen as both potential suckers, ripe for manipulation, or as potential sources of emotional connection—sometimes by the very same student. Students should be warned: Empathy doesn't make a person an easy target. When used with skill, empathy can guide us to balance the needs of ourselves, our students, and our larger social contexts with judicious care.
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- instructors’ self-identification as members of a discipline (sociologists, biologists, etc.) instead of as members of the teaching profession;
- emphasis early in instructors’ careers (graduate school, when working to attain jobs and then tenure) on research and publishing;
- instructors’ resistance to being told what to do;
- instructors’ unwillingness to sacrifice content delivery for better teaching;
- instructors’ momentum and no perception that current practices need to change;
- risk to sense of self involve with change by change by instructors
In it, the author lists 6 reasons why some post-secondary (#highered) instructors are not interested in improving the way they teach:
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- With the abundance of claims about bias emanating from both the right and left, these claims amplify strong partisan's natural tendency to view even favorable coverage as biased to their political view points.
This last cause is a common finding in the literature across studies and topics. As I have written with my colleague John Besley in a recent study, this psychological tendency even likely accounts for why elite groups like scientists hold a pervasive belief in media bias, despite a mainstream media that typically covers science in strongly favorable terms.
"Most people think climate change and sustainability are
important problems, but too few global citizens engaged in
high-greenhouse-gas-emitting behavior are engaged in
enough mitigating behavior to stem the increasing flow of
greenhouse gases and other environmental problems. Why
is that? Structural barriers such as a climate-averse infrastructure
are part of the answer, but psychological barriers
also impede behavioral choices that would facilitate mitigation,
adaptation, and environmental sustainability. Although
many individuals are engaged in some ameliorative
action, most could do more, but they are hindered by seven
categories of psychological barriers, or “dragons of inaction”:
limited cognition about the problem, ideological
worldviews that tend to preclude pro-environmental attitudes
and behavior, comparisons with key other people,
sunk costs and behavioral momentum, discredence toward
experts and authorities, perceived risks of change, and
positive but inadequate behavior change. Structural barriers
must be removed wherever possible, but this is unlikely
to be sufficient. Psychologists must work with other scientists,
technical experts, and policymakers to help citizens
overcome these psychological barriers."
"Series exploring the development of the science of psychology during the 20th century"
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The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.
Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions.
"It turns out, they say, that various online behaviors are a good indicator of personality type. For example, conscientious people are more likely to post asking for help such as a location or e-mail address; a sign of extroversion is an increased use of emoticons; the frequency of status updates correlates with openness; and a measure of neuroticism is the rate at which blog posts attract angry comments.
Based on these correlations, these guys say they can automatically predict personality type simply by looking at an individual's social network statistics. "
"To ask questions about how to live life, to question whether you should be doing what you are doing, is indeed admirable. But to conclude that a positive attitude can solve all problems is naive and denies the possibility to enact change, when necessary, on your circumstances."
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