Janesdiggo's List: Psychology

• Performance tells, and in particular the means to the ends are important. Some people are ruthless because they can be, in the relative imbalance of power, and you have something they want. These are often sociopaths.
• But other people are utterly ruthless because they don't feel or think the way you do, and would just as soon destroy you and your family for a dime or a dollar, if they are so inclined. They can look you in the eye, and lie, and keep lying even past the point of discovery, and never bat an eye. 
• They are not good, but they are also not conventionally evil in the way we might think of it; they are empty, and they seek to fill themselves with whatever and whomever they can obtain.
• THOMAS MORE Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
   
   This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast, man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

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• Presenting an unequivocal graph was powerful enough to change people’s views, even as presenting technical text (at least in the rising temperatures case) was not.

• Meanwhile, getting people to affirm their values and sense of self also decreased their resistance, presumably because they felt less threatened by challenging information after having had their egos reinforced and their identities bolstered.

   
• But I think the finding about self-affirmation is even more important. Because what this shows is that people are clearly resisting facts because these threaten their identities—which means that arguing back at them factually will only make them more defensive and engender a backfire effect. By contrast, approaching them in an emotionally sensitive and aware manner, and making them feel less threatened, will open them up. (Sometimes, at least.)
• Nevertheless, there are also several potential problems that I see with the study, and its global warming portion in particular.

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• • Doesn't mention Jung's take on UFO sightings which he thought were the modern version of fairy sightings
• Those experiencing the onset of psychosis often become convinced that the world has undergone a subtle shift, placing them at centre-stage in a drama of universal proportions.
• • Sounds like your average celebrity or master of the universe
• Victor Tausk argued that the influencing machine emerged from a confusion between the outside world and private mental events, a confusion resolved when the patient invented an external cause to make sense of his thoughts, dreams and hallucinations. But the modern word of television and computers, the virtual and the interactive, blurs traditional distinctions between perception and reality.
• The classical myths of metamorphosis explored the boundaries between humanity and nature and our relationship to the animals and the gods. Likewise, the fantastical technologies that were once the hallmarks of insanity enable us to articulate the possibilities, threats and limits of the tools that are extending our minds into unfamiliar dimensions, both seductive and terrifying.

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• the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.
• The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.
• He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it.
• And yet, Carl Jung’s secret Red Book — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.” Surely it is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom.
• Even as some of his peers in the Jungian world are cautious about regarding Carl Jung as a sage — a history of anti-Semitic remarks and his sometimes patriarchal views of women have caused some to distance themselves — Martin is unapologetically reverential.
• In addition to practicing as an analyst, Martin is the director of the Philemon Foundation, which focuses on preparing the unpublished works of Carl Jung for publication, with the Red Book as its central project.
• Martin and Shamdasani, who started the foundation in 2003, have worked to develop a relationship with the Jung family, the owners and notoriously protective gatekeepers of Jung’s works. Martin echoed what nearly everybody I met subsequently would tell me about working with Jung’s descendants. “It’s sometimes delicate,” he said, adding by way of explanation, “They are very Swiss.”
• What he likely meant by this was that the members of the Jung family who work most actively on maintaining Jung’s estate tend to do things carefully and with an emphasis on privacy and decorum and are on occasion taken aback by the relatively brazen and totally informal way that American Jungians — who it is safe to say are the most ardent of all Jungians — inject themselves into the family’s business.
• IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND and decode the Red Book — a process he says required more than five years of concentrated work — Sonu Shamdasani took long, rambling walks on London’s Hampstead Heath. He would translate the book in the morning, then walk miles in the park in the afternoon, his mind trying to follow the rabbit’s path Jung had forged through his own mind.
• Shamdasani first approached the family with a proposal to edit and eventually publish the Red Book in 1997, which turned out to be an opportune moment. Franz Jung, a vehement opponent of exposing Jung’s private side, had recently died, and the family was reeling from the publication of two controversial and widely discussed books by an American psychologist named Richard Noll, who proposed that Jung was a philandering, self-appointed prophet of a sun-worshiping Aryan cult and that several of his central ideas were either plagiarized or based upon falsified research.
• While the attacks by Noll might have normally propelled the family to more vociferously guard the Red Book, Shamdasani showed up with the right bargaining chips — two partial typed draft manuscripts (without illustrations) of the Red Book he had dug up elsewhere.
• The fact that there were partial copies of the Red Book signified two things — one, that Jung had distributed it to at least a few friends, presumably soliciting feedback for publication; and two, that the book, so long considered private and inaccessible, was in fact findable.
• With or without the family’s blessing, the Red Book — or at least parts of it — would likely become public at some point soon, “probably,” Shamdasani wrote ominously in a report to the family, “in sensationalistic form.”
• The central premise of the book, Shamdasani told me, was that Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism — what he called “the spirit of the times” — and over the course of many quixotic encounters with his own soul and with other inner figures, he comes to know and appreciate “the spirit of the depths,” a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams.
• “It is the nuclear reactor for all his works,” Shamdasani said, noting that Jung’s more well-known concepts — including his belief that humanity shares a pool of ancient wisdom that he called the collective unconscious and the thought that personalities have both male and female components (animus and anima) — have their roots in the Red Book
• his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the book, shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature.”
• The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is arresting and also strange.
• Once it’s published, there will be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Jungian scholarship,” he told me, adding, “it will wipe out all the biographies, just for starters.” What about the rest of us, the people who aren’t Jungians, I wondered. Was there something in the Red Book for us? “Absolutely, there is a human story here,” Shamdasani said. “The basic message he’s sending is ‘Value your inner life.’ ”

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• So who lied for personal financial gain? “We find that sex, age, grade point average, student debt, size of return, socioeconomic status, and average time spent in religious observation are not related to the decision to lie,” Childs writes in the journal Economics Letters.
• Among those more likely to lie for financial gain were:
• Business majors
• Students whose parents were divorced
• Those for whom religion was more important to their lives.

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• What was also interesting, and what we will get back to, is that when they heard other people had similar opinions to their own, their conviction went up without their opinion changing.
• when they heard other people had similar opinions to their own, their conviction went up without their opinion changing
• after many interactions, the convictions of the group always ended up high even if the answer was wrong
• when people heard similar opinions, their convictions rose, but if they heard differing opinions their convictions didn’t lower.
• conviction correlated to consensus rather than correctness after a few interactions
• two kinds of attractors. Namely, small groups of “experts,” defined as people with very strong convictions but who were not necessarily correct (think Larry Summers), and large groups of people with low convictions but who all happen to agree with each other.
• these two populations are attractors was named by the authors as “the expert effect” and “the majority effect” respectively. And if fewer than 15% of the population were experts, in the presence of a majority, the majority effect dominated.
• If 70% or more of the population was noise, then the two effects described above vanished.

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• "The human brain works slower in old age," says Ramscar, "but only because we have stored more information over time."
• The research shows that studies of the problems older people have with recalling names suffer from a similar blind spot: there is a far greater variety of given names today than there were two generations ago.

• critics have proposed that every generation is “Generation Me,” and narcissism is just an eternal symptom of youth.
• We have a word for people who have become high on their own hollow self-esteem: narcissist.
• It wasn’t low self-esteem that caused violence: It was when self-esteem was artificially high.
• In America there’s a third movement, the libertarians, who are trying to reduce government involvement and promote freedom. To me, they make a lot of sense.”

  • He said he doesn't take a political stance; yet it appears he does have one, libertarian. Ironic given that libertarians are probably the most narcisstic people on the planet ...
• “I came to realize that those who come to do evil don’t view it as evil. Evil is in the mind of the perceiver. Most of the Nazis thought they were doing noble work.”
• It was people who were high in narcissism who were more provoked and more aggressive than everybody else.
• cognitively inflating one’s self-image is a way of fooling the natural sociometer mechanism into thinking one is a valued relational partner.”
• Narcissism, then, is a kind of addiction to self-esteem
• Baumeister’s study was published in May 2003. “It was,” he says, “a shock to a lot of people.”
• “Self-esteem,” they wrote, “is one’s subjective appraisal of how one is faring with regard to being a valuable, viable and sought-after member of the groups and relationships to which one belongs and aspires to belong.”
• “When they tracked people over time,” says Baumeister, “the grades came first, and then the self-esteem. High self-esteem was a result of good grades, not a cause.”
• Evil, he suggested, was often accompanied by high self-esteem. “Dangerous people, from playground bullies to warmongering dictators, consist mostly of those who have highly favorable views of themselves,” he wrote.
• Caring just slows me down.

  • That could be a mantra for the 21st century :(
• “Narcissists believe they deserve to be treated better than other people,” he says. They also lack the moral values of people with genuine high self-esteem.
• “When they tracked people over time,” says Baumeister, “the grades came first, and then the self-esteem. High self-esteem was a result of good grades, not a cause.”

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• It showed that ordinary people could commit acts of extraordinary harm, but that thoughtlessness was not the main motivator, he said.

   

  “We argue that people are aware of what they are doing, but that they think it is the right thing to do,” he said.

   

  “This comes from identification with a cause — and an acceptance that the authority is a legitimate representative of that cause.”
• • Could explain all the evil done in the name of religion