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You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong...
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature... people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them...
In general, the difference in stress levels between those who were exposed to the event and those who were not was smaller for religious people than for spiritual people or those who were neither.
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But if you look at the graph, you can see that something more complex is happening. The reason that there is no difference among religious people is not just because between those who experienced the event have fewer ill effects. It's also because those who did not directly experience it have more flashbacks.
It seems that religious people who did not directly experience the event were still affected by it, while those who did experience it were less affected. Perhaps this is because they are plugged into a wider social network, which allows the burden of distressing events to be shared.
A year after the Fukushima reactor catastrophe, we can start to estimate its effects on people’s medical and mental health. Curiously, it’s the mental impact that we can predict best. As a recent Green Blog post by Matthew Wald explained, the medical effects are expected to be too weak and widely dispersed to measure. According to one theory, the increased radiation received by hundreds of thousands of citizens will cause an increase in their cancer rate — but an increase too tiny to detect amid the large number of cancers that will occur anyway. According to a rival theory, radiation at these low levels will cause scarcely any cancers at all. Scientists just don’t know.
The psychological impact, however, is plain. Precisely because damage from very-low-level radiation cannot be detected, people exposed to it are left in anguished uncertainty. Many believe they have been fundamentally contaminated for life. They may refuse to have children for fear of birth defects. They may be shunned by others who fear a sort of mysterious contagion.
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Such great psychological danger does not accompany other materials that put people at risk of cancer and other deadly illness. Visceral fear is not widely aroused by, for example, the daily emissions from coal burning, although, as a National Academy of Sciences study found, this causes 10,000 premature deaths a year among Americans. It is only nuclear radiation that bears a huge psychological burden — for it carries a unique historical legacy.
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To be sure, people knew that nuclear energy had a good side. Already in the 1950s, radiation therapy was saving lives by the million. But thoughts of “good atoms” were overwhelmed by the terrors of the Cold War. Outcries against bomb tests focused on the radioactive materials they spread around the world on the winds. Debates over fallout shelters offered an image of a dead planet scourged by radioactive dust. In short, fear of nuclear war drove home images of radiation as an insidious contamination that was uniquely deadly on a global scale.
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From personality to neuropsychiatric disorders, individual differences in brain function are known to have a strong heritable component. Here we report that between close relatives, a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders covary strongly with intellectual interests. We surveyed an entire class of high-functioning young adults at an elite university for prospective major, familial incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, and demographic and attitudinal questions. Students aspiring to technical majors (science/mathematics/engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder (p = 0.037). Conversely, students interested in the humanities were more likely to report a family member with major depressive disorder (p = 8.8×10−4), bipolar disorder (p = 0.027), or substance abuse problems (p = 1.9×10−6). A combined PREdisposition for Subject MattEr (PRESUME) score based on these disorders was strongly predictive of subject matter interests (p = 9.6×10−8). Our results suggest that shared genetic (and perhaps environmental) factors may both predispose for heritable neuropsychiatric disorders and influence the development of intellectual interests.
Have you heard about The Debunking Handbook? It's a must-read for anyone interested in dispelling the misinformation put out by climate change deniers.
The Handbook's tips are taken not from the latest climate science, as you might expect, but from psychological research. As its authors, John Cook (creator of the Skeptical Science website) and Stephan Lewandowsky (a professor of psychology at the University of Western Australia) explain, debunking a myth requires more than just "packing more information into people's heads." Our brains don't work like hard drives - they're much more complex.
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- Focus on the truth, not the myth. You want to increase your audience’s familiarity with the right facts, not the misinformation. Don’t give the myth more attention than it deserves, or your efforts might “backfire.” It even helps, before you mention a myth, to add an explicit disclaimer: “The information to follow is FALSE!”
- Less can be more. Although it might be tempting to list every piece of evidence that disproves a denier’s argument, research shows this is “overkill.” It’s best to keep your argument simple. People are most likely to believe information that’s easy to understand.
- Be clever and present information in a way that is least threatening to your audience’s worldviews. If we’re not careful, our debunking efforts could further polarize the climate change “debate”. Check out this past blog post or listen to this podcast for more info.
- Finally, expose the strategy behind the myth you’re attempting to debunk. Does the myth stem from teachings of a faux-expert? Is the myth a piece of information that’s “cherry-picked” and used out of context? What motives may have been behind the spreading of the misinformation?
Victoria Bekiempis an American writer, asks, rhetorically:
‘Are women crazy?
The world’s mostly male “great thinkers” have tended to say so, characterising women as the weaker sex both physically and psychologically.’
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In a piece that states how women are diagnosed with and treated for mental health problems in greater numbers than men, she ‘blames’ theorists such as Freud for pathologising women as ‘hysterical’:
‘Sigmund Freud’s notion of penis envy. The Austrian psychiatrist claimed that women are batshit because, well, they just aren’t men. The result? Little girls would all grow up to become masochists with daddy complexes. The proof, supposedly, was rooted in the “phallic” way they liked to plait hair’.
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Apart from the complete misunderstanding of Freud, and later Foucault, (you know, Freud doesn’t exactly present men as without their problems. Oedipus, masochism, perversion, neuroses- these are not merely attributed to women by Freud), the writer is doing exactly what she says Freud did. She is giving women a ‘Big Bad Daddy’ to have a complex about – male dominated medicine and psychiatry, and the big bad wolf of ‘rape culture’.
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Martin Bunzl, a philosophy professor at Rutgers University, compared the climate change movement to the civil rights movement. Climate change is often described as a "technical" problem with technical solutions, he said, a portrayal that research has shown is ineffective.
Instead, he said, the key is culture change -- it's about changing what's in people's heads.
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a basic principle in social psychology: that people's attitudes do not translate into action. But most environmental activism remains centered around the assumption that changing behavior starts with changing attitudes and knowledge.
"Social psychologists have now known for four decades that the relationship between people's attitudes and knowledge and behavior is scant at best," said McKenzie-Mohr. Yet campaigns remain heavily focused on brochures, flyers and other means of disseminating information. "I could just as easily call this presentation 'beyond brochures,'" he said.
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To bridge the gap between attitudes and action, people must first address the barriers that stand in the way of action, McKenzie-Mohr said.
Barriers include not knowing what actions to take, not understanding the benefits or having mistaken information -- for example, research has shown that the top reason parents do not want their kids to bike or walk to school is because they fear abductions, even though the number of abductions per year in Canada is often in the single digits, McKenzie-Mohr said.
Several sessions at the conference discussed bridging this gap between beliefs and actions. That will affect individual behavior, such as turning off the lights, not driving a car or eating less meat.
The conference was attended by some 400 people from utilities, national nonprofit organizations, community groups, consulting firms and other businesses, and both the federal government and local governments, according to a participant list.
Speakers tended to agree that changing people's attitudes remains a problem.
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China, however, is a strong counterpoint to the claim that moralising, universal gods are needed for the establishment of co-operative mega-societies. Religion in China simply doe snot play the same role as it doe sin the West. Most religion is composed of a blend of philosophical life stances with localised folk myths.
And yet China is by anyone's standards an enormously successful mega-society, really without parallel in the World. As an example of large-scale co-operation among unrelated individuals, it really is a paragon of orderliness and stability.
And yet, the case of Yueye has got me thinking. I'm certainly no expert on Chinese psychology and culture. But if, as Zhang implies, there really is this profound cultural difference between China and other cultures, then maybe the type of religion really does have a meaningful effect on altruism.
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In our culture, there's a lack of willingness to show compassion to strangers. We are brought up to show kindness to people in our network of guanxi, family and friends and business associates, but not particularly to strangers, especially if such kindness may potentially damage your interest.
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Basically, the idea is that the invention of monotheism allowed civilisation to step up a grade, by improving co-operation among unrelated individuals (see Did world religions help bring about complex societies?). Having a moralising, universal god encourages you to be nice to strangers, even when your evolutionarily-inspired instincts push you towards selfishness.
I've always been sceptical of the idea. Pure altruism can in fact be explained as a biological, rather than cultural, trait. But more importantly to me the suggestion seemed to smack of Western narrow-mindedness. Most psychology is done in the West, and so people who study the psychology of religion typically take our peculiar brand of religion to be 'normal'.
China, however, is a strong counterpoint to the claim that moralising, universal gods are needed for the establishment of co-operative mega-societies. Religion in China simply doe snot play the same role as it doe sin the West. Most religion is composed of a blend of philosophical life stances with localised folk myths.
And yet China is by anyone's standards an enormously successful mega-society, really without parallel in the World. As an example of large-scale co-operation among unrelated individuals, it really is a paragon of orderliness and stability.
And yet, the case of Yueye has got me thinking. I'm certainly no expert on Chinese psychology and culture. But if, as Zhang implies, there really is this profound cultural difference between China and other cultures, then maybe the type of religion really does have a meaningful effect on altruism.
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Inspired by Heidegger, Paul Colaizzi articulates the interlink between sexuality embodiment time death and technology (1978): “Sexuality must be repressed because it is bodily activity; the body must be repressed because it is the vehicle of life; life itself must be repressed because life and death go together... man represses death... and to repress death successfully... creates technology” (6-7). Foucault (1976/1980) completes the picture: “death is so carefully evaded” because “death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it” (138).
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For 2,500 years, the marriage between Platonism and Christendom has prompted praise. Western civilization exalts this abstract mythical vision as intellectually lofty and spiritually superior. Nietzsche (1889/1982), however, exposes Plato as a “coward before reality,” rails against his other-worldly orientation, his “decadence-values,” and unmasks his “hostility against life” (558-59; 572, 574). Nietzsche (1889/1982) shows that Plato’s writings about love, the body, Eros, and sublimation are contrived: “The pure spirit is the pure lie” (575).
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Empirical surveys can give us a list of the different ideas people have of happiness. But research has shown that when people achieve their ideas of happiness (marriage, children, wealth, fame), they often are still not happy. There’s no reason to think that the ideas of happiness we discover by empirical surveys are sufficiently well thought out to lead us to genuine happiness. For richer and more sensitive conceptions of happiness, we need to turn to philosophers, who, from Plato and Aristotle, through Hume and Mill, to Hegel and Nietzsche, have provided some of the deepest insight into the possible meanings of happiness.
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Even if empirical investigation could discover the full range of possible conceptions of happiness, there would still remain the question of which conception we ought to try to achieve. Here we have a question of values that empirical inquiry alone is unable to decide without appeal to philosophical thinking.
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Mother Theresa said "If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." Josef Stalin said "One death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic." Numerous experiments have helped verify the truth behind what both the saint and the mass murderer knew intuitively, that we relate more closely to what happens to one person than to what happens to large numbers of people.
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Paul Slovic, one of the pioneers of research into the way we perceive risk, calls this greater concern for the one than the many "a fundamental deficiency in our humanity." As the world watches but, insufficiently moved, fails to act to prevent mass starvation or stop genocides in Congo or Kosovo or Cambodia or so many more, who would not agree with such a lament. But as heartless as it seems to care more about the one than the many, it makes perfect sense in terms of human psychology. You are a person, not a number. You don't see digits in the mirror, you see a face. And you don't see a crowd. You see an individual. So you and I relate more powerfully to the reality of a single person than to the numbing faceless nameless lifeless abstraction of numbers. "Statistics," as Slovic put it in a paper titled "Psychic Numbing and Genocide" , "are human beings with the tears dried off." This tendency to relate more emotionally to the reality of a single person than to two or more people, or to the abstraction of statistics, is especially powerful when it comes to the way we perceive risk and danger, because what might happen to a single real person, might happen to you. As the familiar adage puts it, "There but for the grace of God go I."
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Statistical numbing plays a huge role in what the news media covers, and what it doesn't, since the media are in the business of bringing us information we are likely to pay attention to, and our attention is less drawn to numbers than stories about individual people (which explains the success of the narrative device of weaving stories about big issues around a personal example). Less coverage means less concern, because we certainly can't be moved by these tragedies if we don't know much about them. And public concern drives government policy, so statistical numbing helps explain why nations so often fail to expend their resources to save people elsewhere who are starving, or dying of disease, or being raped and murdered, in the tens and hundreds of thousands.
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X-Phi is a branch of psychology that specializes in how the mind actually works when we make judgments about philosophically interesting topics.
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philosophers, especially prior to the 20th century, did make claims about how the mind actually works, so this is actually just a return to the classical tradition. (There may also be an underlying narrative of progress: put in my terms, the suggestion is that philosophy has always been psychology, but only now it is done properly and scientifically.) Behind this response, there may be a causal hypothesis: certain misguided developments within philosophy (maybe Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Husserl) led to an aberration that has now finally run its course.
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It is true, of course, that many philosophers from Aristotle to Nietzsche did make claims about how the mind actually works. (Though I’d be surprised to learn they had an interest in folk classification.) But then Aristotle made all sorts of biological claims, too, and pioneered just about any other empirical discipline as well, Descartes worked on optics and geometry, Kant wrote about astronomy, and so on. No one would now say that they were doing philosophy when they did so (though at the time they may have seen no significant difference between their various projects, and all their work would have been then labelled as philosophy). Why? Because we can see now, in retrospect, that these are issues that are best settled with empirical evidence. Psychology was among the last sciences to gain independence from philosophy in the 19th century; that is the real reason why only 20th century philosophers needed to and were able to distinguish their own project from psychology, not the emergence of some misguided doctrine. But that is not to say that we can’t trace the non-empirical and non-psychological questions and methods back to earlier work, and see that they form the core of what the people we now regard as great philosophers did.
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in the middle of this golden age of behavioral research, there is a bill working through Congress that would eliminate the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. This is exactly how budgets should not be balanced — by cutting cheap things that produce enormous future benefits.
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Eldar Shafir of Princeton and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard have recently, with federal help, been exploring a third theory, that scarcity produces its own cognitive traits.
A quick question: What is the starting taxi fare in your city? If you are like most upper-middle-class people, you don’t know. If you are like many struggling people, you do know. Poorer people have to think hard about a million things that affluent people don’t. They have to make complicated trade-offs when buying a carton of milk: If I buy milk, I can’t afford orange juice. They have to decide which utility not to pay.
These questions impose enormous cognitive demands. The brain has limited capacities. If you increase demands on one sort of question, it performs less well on other sorts of questions.
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Shafir and Mullainathan gave batteries of tests to Indian sugar farmers. After they sell their harvest, they live in relative prosperity. During this season, the farmers do well on the I.Q. and other tests. But before the harvest, they live amid scarcity and have to think hard about a thousand daily decisions. During these seasons, these same farmers do much worse on the tests. They appear to have lower I.Q.’s. They have more trouble controlling their attention. They are more shortsighted. Scarcity creates its own psychology.
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I tend to be pretty skeptical of evolutionary psychology in general. The reason isn’t because there is anything inherently wrong about thinking that (some) human behavioral traits evolved in response to natural selection. That’s just an uncontroversial consequence of standard evolutionary theory. The devil, rather, is in the details: it is next to impossible to test specific evopsych hypotheses because the crucial data are often missing. The fossil record hardly helps (if we are talking about behavior), there are precious few closely related species for comparison (and they are not at all that closely related), and the current ecological-social environment is very different from the “ERE,” the Evolutionarily Relevant Environment (which means that measuring selection on a given trait in today’s humans is pretty much irrelevant).
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Mercier and Sperber’s basic argument is that reason did not evolve to allow us to seek truth, but rather to win arguments with our fellow human beings. We are natural lawyers, not natural philosophers. This, according to them, explains why people are so bad at reasoning, for instance why we tend to fall for basic mistakes such as the well known confirmation bias — a tendency to seek evidence in favor of one’s position and discount contrary evidence that is well on display in politics and pseudoscience.
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language possibly evolved to coordinate hunting and gossip about your neighbor. That doesn’t mean we can’t take writing and speaking courses and dramatically improve on our given endowment, natural selection be damned.
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This study, and many others like it, is described in Cordelia Fine's brilliant new book Delusions of Gender. She offers a fair and detailed review of research on the psychological and neurobiological foundations of gender difference. Her finding is clear and persuasive: Whatever cognitive or personality differences there are between men and women cannot be attributed, except in a few isolated cases, to intrinsic biological or psychological differences between men and women, at least not in the current state of knowledge.
It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007—from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling—a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children, well ahead of physical disabilities like cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, for which the federal programs were created.
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most psychiatrists treat only with drugs, and refer patients to psychologists or social workers if they believe psychotherapy is also warranted. The shift from “talk therapy” to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs.
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after Prozac came to market in 1987 and was intensively promoted as a corrective for a deficiency of serotonin in the brain. The number of people treated for depression tripled in the following ten years, and about 10 percent of Americans over age six now take antidepressants.
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If a century seems like a long time for a culture of racism to persist, consider the findings of a recent study on the persistence of anti-Semitism in Germany: Communities that murdered their Jewish populations during the 14th-century Black Death pogroms were more likely to demonstrate a violent hatred of Jews nearly 600 years later. A culture of intolerance can be very persistent indeed.
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Changing any aspect of culture—the norms, attitudes, and "unwritten rules" of a group—isn't easy. Beliefs are passed down from parent to child—positions on everything from childbearing to religious beliefs to risk-taking are transmitted across generations. Newcomers, meanwhile, may be attracted by the culture of their chosen home—Europeans longing for smaller government and lower taxes choose to move to the United States, for example, while Americans looking for Big Brotherly government move in the other direction. Once they arrive, these migrants tend to take on the attitudes of those around them—American-born Italians hold more "American" views with each subsequent generation.
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"Good" cultural attitudes—like trust and tolerance—may thus be sustained across generations. But the flipside is that "bad" attitudes—mutual hatred and xenophobia—may also persist.
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