Psych / sociology
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neglected doh!
MERRI OK
SEE PSYCHOLOGY
GOP was place for attempts to understand conservative mind/psych
psy-op DAPL frack
PR bernays
b2 torture
cambridge anal / big data
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AN 5 26
For years, scientists have researched whether there is any connection between genetic intelligence and political preference, yet the results were contradictory. By incorporating class into the research, however, one researcher has found a startling and consistent pattern: Intelligent people are inclined to be left-wing economically if they were born poor and right-wing economically if they were born wealthy.
“In this study, I argue that this puzzle can only be understood from a gene–environment interaction (GxE) perspective,” wrote Uppsala University's Department of Government researcher Rafael Ahlskog in the journal Political Psychology. “Drawing on traditional theories of political preference formation, I argue that genetics associated with cognitive performance should cause more left-wing economic preferences if you grow up in relative poverty, but more right-wing economic preferences if you grow up affluent. Utilizing variation in a polygenic index (PGI) of cognitive performance within dizygotic twin pairs, coupled with unique register data on economic conditions for the twins, their parents, and their childhood neighborhood, I show that the causal effect of the PGI on economic conservatism is zero on average, but indeed sizable and sign-discordant by class background.”
Ahlskog added, “The GxE perspective thus has wide-ranging implications for future research attempting to integrate genetic methods into political psychology.”
In short, while intelligence does impact a person’s political preferences, smart people will lean toward conclusions that are perceived as providing the most benefit to their specific class, regardless of its specific ideological content.
To learn this, Ahlskog decided to study a large sample of fraternal twins born between 1943 and 1958 and studied by the Swedish Twin Registry (Zagai et al., 2019).
“The twins have also been connected to rich registry sources for things like education and income, as well as to the intergenerational registry, allowing the addition of the same register variables for the parents of the twins,” Ahlskog added. “A separate full population register dataset has been used to obtain information about context/neighborhood [socioeconomic index].”
Despite its robust source base, the study is not without its limitations.
“he genetic predictor is a noisy measurement that only captures a fraction of the actual heritable traits for cognitive performance,” reported PsyPost's Karina Petrova on Wednesday. “Comparing genetic differences within local twin pairs amplifies this measurement noise even further. As a result, the reported effects are likely much smaller than the actual biological impact.”
Petrova added, “The geographical and historical realities of the respondent group also matter. The individuals in this sample grew up in Sweden during the middle of the twentieth century, a period defined by the rapid expansion of the modern welfare state. Class-based politics and labor movements were highly salient in their daily lives.”
This is not the first study to demonstrate a link between intelligence and political ideology. A February study in the journal Intelligence studied 7,000 third-grade students by determining their IQs, following up with the high IQ and non-high IQ students six years later to confirm their IQs and then do so again 35 years later to assess their political views. It found that non-gifted men were more likely to be conservative than gifted men, while for women there was no difference between IQ groups and their political views.
On a related note, an April study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin revealed that among 1,600 people dating online, liberals overwhelmingly and disproportionately were likely to rank men who supported right-wing conspiracy theories about vaccines and election denial to be less intelligent than those who did not. Liberals were also found to reject conservatives at much higher rates than conservatives rejected liberals.
“Disclosing conspiracy beliefs in online dating profiles undermines impressions of warmth, intelligence, and trustworthiness, which are important for online dating success,” the authors wrote in their conclusion. “Right-wing conspiracy beliefs were particularly stigmatized, with liberals being harsher in their judgments and conservatives showing greater leniency.”
AN 3 26
Brain scans reveal the truth: MAGA is literally wired differently - Alternet.org
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AN 2 26
PsyPost reports that a new study published in the journal Advances in Psychology suggests that White people who personally perceive themselves as ranking at the bottom of the racial economic hierarchy or “tied” with Black Americans were the most likely to support President Donald Trump.
Previous research identified a phenomenon known as “last place aversion,” where people fear being at the very bottom of a social hierarchy — and Trump voters apparently feel the sting of smallness more acutely than others, whether or not they are actually at the bottom rung of the ladder.
Surprisingly, researchers found that these attitudes were not driven by actual poverty. The researchers controlled for objective indicators of socioeconomic status, such as income and education levels. They found that belonging to the “last place” profile predicted Trump support and anti-DEI attitudes regardless of how much money or education the participant actually had.
“We … [expected] a subset of non-Hispanic, white Americans who feel ‘last place.’ That said, we expected this profile to be more likely among working class individuals,” Cooley told PsyPost.“However, perceiving oneself to be ‘last place’ was not associated with the lowest objective income nor the lowest objective education among the White Americans in our samples.”
The United States currently exhibits a significant racial wealth gap with economic statistics consistently showing that the average white family holds considerably more wealth than the average Black or Hispanic family. But despite this reality, surveys indicate that many white Americans feel they are “personally falling behind” in terms of status without realistically weighing the resources at their disposal.
“This line of research was motivated by recent political trends among some white Americans, including support for DEI bans, alignment with alt-right ideology, and endorsement of political violence in pursuit of political goals (e.g., January 6th),” said study authors Erin Cooley and Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi, associate professors of psychology at Colgate University and the University of Virginia, respectively. “Many of these attitudes are not only extreme but also anti-democratic, raising questions about how such views can coexist with identities centered on being ‘most American’ (e.g., white nationalist belief systems).”
The tool researchers used to assess personal status was a box measure called the “Perceived Self-Group Hierarchy.” Participants viewed a diagram representing a status ladder based on money, education, and job prestige, and they were asked to place markers representing themselves, white people, Black people, Asian people, and Hispanic people onto this ladder.
Researchers found a consistent link between this “last place” profile and specific political views.
“White Americans who fit this profile reported the highest levels of support for Donald Trump throughout the campaign season. They also expressed the strongest intention to vote for him. When surveyed the day after the election, this group was the most likely to report having cast their ballot for Trump,” PsyPost reports.
This same group of insecure white people also showed “the strongest opposition to DEI programs, favoring policies that would ban such initiatives in universities.” Additionally, they showed higher alignment with alt-right ideologies, agreeing more frequently with statements such as “White people are generally under attack in the U.S.” and “The government threatens my personal rights.”
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AN 1 26 VID
There have been a lot of conflicting comments about the various videos showing the ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis mom killed last week. One behavioral expert walked through how people can see the exact same video and have completely different takes on the matter.
Speaking to CNN on Wednesday, social psychologist Emily Balcetis said that she's been studying for 20 years how people look at the same evidence in a case and come to different conclusions.
Balcetis, who penned the book Social Psychology of Visual Perception, told Pamela Brown that people consider a video as a neutral witness, when that isn't necessarily the case.
"Of course, video provides important and valuable information that we need to understand the events of this case," she noted. "But it's not a complete understanding of what what has happened, because video evidence and the footage that it creates is constrained by where the camera is located and what that camera is pointed at, it can't any one video cannot take in the full complexities of a social situation like this one that we saw. The video is missing important information."
Her second point is that observers have limited visual and cognitive abilities and are trying to analyze altercations that are "complex."
"They're fast-moving. There are many moving social dynamics, and that overwhelms our ability to take in with precision and clarity all of what we're seeing at the same time, or at any one moment," said the New York University associate professor. "That means when you couple those two facts together, there are gaps in our understanding of what's happening in this video."
Viewing the video several times doesn't mean that any additional information is gathered because people tend to only see the same things over and over. It does nothing more than solidify the viewer's perspective.
"They're not seeing what they didn't see the first time. That maintains those misunderstandings," Balcetis said. "But then how do we fill in those gaps of understandings?"
She described the human brain as a "computational machine" automatically producing data based on what is viewed.
"Generations and generations have led our brains to evolve to fill in those gaps of understanding. And it does so by leveraging social identities," Balcetis continued. "The more we feel aligned with police officers or with authority will shape not just our opinions about whether that officer was culpable for the violence that we saw, but how we view that video evidence in the first place."
In studies she has performed in the lab, they discovered "the more that somebody paid attention to one target in that video, be it the police officer or anybody, that they held a negative attitude towards, the more that they were confident that that person was the aggressor, that they were the ones responsible for the violence that they observed because the more you pay attention to any one target, the what we found in the science was that the more inaccurate they were about the full scope of the case facts."
The goal is to shift understandings in an era governed by polarization.
One thing a viewer can do to account for this "is to try hard to look for the things that we didn't see the first time. If we try to pay attention to what didn't capture our attention to the thing that didn't move fast, to the thing that we didn't think was threatening in the first place, we might understand the case facts in a different way."
In her case, she didn't see Good turn her wheel sharply to the right to go around the officer. After she noticed that, she said it changed her perspective on the matter entirely.
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AN THE CONV 10 25
Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It’s one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that’s obviously wrong.
Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods.
We are social psychologists who study political psychology and how people reason about reality. During the pandemic, we surveyed 5,535 people across eight countries to investigate why people believed COVID-19 misinformation, like false claims that 5G networks cause the virus.
The strongest predictor of whether someone believed in COVID-19-related misinformation and risks related to the vaccine was whether they viewed COVID-19 prevention efforts in terms of symbolic strength and weakness. In other words, this group focused on whether an action would make them appear to fend off or “give in” to untoward influence.
This factor outweighed how people felt about COVID-19 in general, their thinking style and even their political beliefs.
Our survey measured it on a scale of how much people agreed with sentences including “Following coronavirus prevention guidelines means you have backed down” and “Continuous coronavirus coverage in the media is a sign we are losing.” Our interpretation is that people who responded positively to these statements would feel they “win” by endorsing misinformation – doing so can show “the enemy” that it will not gain any ground over people’s views.
When meaning is symbolic, not factual
Rather than consider issues in light of actual facts, we suggest people with this mindset prioritize being independent from outside influence. It means you can justify espousing pretty much anything – the easier a statement is to disprove, the more of a power move it is to say it, as it symbolizes how far you’re willing to go.
When people think symbolically this way, the literal issue – here, fighting COVID-19 – is secondary to a psychological war over people’s minds. In the minds of those who think they’re engaged in them, psychological wars are waged over opinions and attitudes, and are won via control of belief and messaging. The U.S. government at various times has used the concept of psychological war to try to limit the influence of foreign powers, pushing people to think that literal battles are less important than psychological independence.
By that same token, vaccination, masking or other COVID-19 prevention efforts could be seen as a symbolic risk that could “weaken” one psychologically even if they provide literal physical benefits. If this seems like an extreme stance, it is – the majority of participants in our studies did not hold this mindset. But those who did were especially likely to also believe in misinformation.
In an additional study we ran that focused on attitudes around cryptocurrency, we measured whether people saw crypto investment in terms of signaling independence from traditional finance. These participants, who, like those in our COVID-19 study, prioritized a symbolic show of strength, were more likely to believe in other kinds of misinformation and conspiracies, too, such as that the government is concealing evidence of alien contact.
In all of our studies, this mindset was also strongly associated with authoritarian attitudes, including beliefs that some groups should dominate others and support for autocratic government. These links help explain why strongman leaders often use misinformation symbolically to impress and control a population.
Why people endorse misinformation
Our findings highlight the limits of countering misinformation directly, because for some people, literal truth is not the point.
For example, President Donald Trump incorrectly claimed in August 2025 that crime in Washington D.C. was at an all-time high, generating countless fact-checks of his premise and think pieces about his dissociation from reality.
But we believe that to someone with a symbolic mindset, debunkers merely demonstrate that they’re the ones reacting, and are therefore weak. The correct information is easily available, but is irrelevant to someone who prioritizes a symbolic show of strength. What matters is signaling one isn’t listening and won’t be swayed.
In fact, for symbolic thinkers, nearly any statement should be justifiable. The more outlandish or easily disproved something is, the more powerful one might seem when standing by it. Being an edgelord – a contrarian online provocateur – or outright lying can, in their own odd way, appear “authentic.”
Some people may also view their favorite dissembler’s claims as provocative trolling, but, given the link between this mindset and authoritarianism, they want those far-fetched claims acted on anyway. The deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, for example, can be the desired end goal, even if the offered justification is a transparent farce.
Is this really 5-D chess?
It is possible that symbolic, but not exactly true, beliefs have some downstream benefit, such as serving as negotiation tactics, loyalty tests, or a fake-it-till-you-make-it long game that somehow, eventually, becomes a reality. Political theorist Murray Edelman, known for his work on political symbolism, noted that politicians often prefer scoring symbolic points over delivering results – it’s easier. Leaders can offer symbolism when they have little tangible to provide.
Randy Stein, Associate Professor of Marketing, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and Abraham Rutchick, Professor of Psychology, California State University, Northridge
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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AN 8 25
PsyPost reports a new psychological study has found that people who claim favorable views of President Donald Trump also tend to score higher on measures of callousness, manipulation, and other malevolent traits—and lower on empathy and compassion.
“Our findings suggest a link between malevolent personality and conservative political ideology, which in our study included positive view of Trump, and that persons with malevolent personality dispositions view political figures with malevolent traits favorably,” said study author Craig Neumann, a Regents Professor of Psychology at the University of North Texas. “Further, people who view malevolent political figures favorably also report less empathy for others and enjoy the suffering of others.”
The paper, which was several years in the making, “was designed to address why some people might view favorably a political figure with a history of business failures, bankruptcies, misogynistic statements caught on video, use of charity money for a self-portrait, etc,” said Neuman.
READ MORE: Tipping point: Analysts say Trump 'panicked' as he 'keeps a death grip on the government'
PsyPost said researchers conducted two large surveys with a total of more than 9,000 U.S. participants. The first sample consisted of 1,000 men recruited online, about one-third of whom were racial or ethnic minorities. The second sample included 8,047 men and women who completed personality questionnaires on a public psychology website. Participants in both samples completed a range of validated questionnaires measuring political attitudes, personality traits, and empathy, researchers say.
In “Sample 1”, researchers measured social dominance orientation (the belief that some groups should dominate others), right-wing authoritarianism (support for conformity, obedience, and traditional norms), and psychopathic traits. In “Sample 2,” researchers say they added measures of broader malevolent traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism) and benevolent traits (humanism, faith in humanity and respect for others).
The findings “consistently showed people who identified as politically conservative—and especially those who rated Trump’s presidency highly—were more likely to score higher on measures of authoritarianism, social dominance, and malevolent personality traits,” reports PsyPost.
In the first sample of men, all three predictors — social dominance, authoritarianism, and psychopathic tendencies — predicted conservative ideology and favorable views of Trump, but only for white participants.
READ MORE: The only strategy that will destroy Trumpism — once and for all
The report also revealed that while both men and women showed similar patterns, the associations were stronger for men
Read the full PsyPost report at this link.
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/should-progressives-demonize-ignore-or-attempt-find-common-ground-60-million
...This us-versus-them narrative may be convenient, but it undermines the best of the progressive tradition and simply fails to account for the validity of white working-class Americans’ experience with real, rock-hard economic truths. When we buy into it as the whole story, we allow the minority of white nationalists in the Trump coalition to blind us to the truths about the cross-section of Americans who pulled the lever for him in 2016. Far too many liberals act as if the economic realities of the white working class was at best all in Trump voters’ heads, and at worst simply a fig leaf, rather than a material reality.
Prominent writer and thoughtful analyst Mehdi Hasan, who has spent a lot of time on these matters, recently shared his considered view on this topic. It is valuable to consider his insights. After marshaling survey data and the analysis of other researchers, Hasan wrote in the Intercept that “it’s time to slay this zombie of ‘economic anxiety’ once and for all.” Without dismissing Hasan’s argument out of hand, I would urge us to consider the fundamental truths that uphold the notion that economic experience is a primary driver of people’s voting habits.
The numbers and conclusions that Hasan summoned certainly tell an important story, but if taken as the whole story, they can serve as a particularly convenient “out” for anyone who finds comfort in asserting that conservative or right-wing voters not only made a bad choice, but are, themselves, bad people.
We can then reason that their bad choice was motivated by bad values, and that we are right to stand against them and their bad motivations. It’s a simple story of us-versus-them, good-versus-evil. “Convenient” isn’t a synonym for “accurate,” however. And Hasan himself quietly acknowledges that his conclusions don’t mean “that economic grievances are irrelevant.” But these grievances are more than relevant—they are crucial for understanding our fellow Americans.
For instance, shortly after the 2016 election, the New York Times reported that there were “almost 9 million more jobs than there... [had been a decade earlier], just before the economy tumbled into recession. But the gains... [were not] evenly distributed.”
White Americans, “who account for 78 percent of the labor force,” actually “lost[emphasis added] more than 700,000 net jobs” between 2009 and 2016. Hispanic Americans, who make up less than 15 percent of the labor force, gained more than 50 percent of the jobs. Employment gains among black and Asian Americans were also disproportionate to their numbers in the workforce.
Image source: New York Times, December 13, 2016
While we can explain that these job gains were an overdue corrective to a long history of employment and structural disadvantages for communities of color, the fact is that the economy didn’t right itself evenly, and those left behind are still reeling from the economic implosion of 2008 and struggling to make sense of it. Is it racist to identify the racial component of the distribution of the recovery? Are voters who feel this very real economic pain in their everyday lives racist for resenting it?
If post-recession opportunities are shrinking for the white working class, these voters are going to want to fight to change a system that’s creating not more but less opportunity for them and their families. We can’t ignore this experience and hope that, in some super-human way, these voters will transcend it. Progressives may not agree with the meaning that some working-class whites are making of these numbers, but we need a strategy to engage them, and, from my experience, summing them up as racists is unlikely to change how they vote or motivate them to think differently about the issues facing the nation.
More recently, the Times reported that 2016 saw a sharp slowdown in business investment in very narrow sectors of the economy; that, in fact, part of America lived through another recession in the run-up to the presidential election, though most of us didn’t notice it: “Overall economic growth slowed but remained in positive territory. The national unemployment rate kept falling. Anyone who didn’t work in energy, agriculture or manufacturing could be forgiven for not noticing it at all.”
[graf]
Here’s another rock-hard economic truth ignored by too many liberals: The industries hit hardest by those negative numbers correlate very closely to the parts of the country where Trump won key votes.
Two things are striking: The economic reality facing these white working-class voters—not their “anxiety,” but the real hardship they were and are enduring—shaped their experience heading into the 2016 election. And, in more diverse and prosperous urban areas that serve as Democratic strongholds, we didn’t even notice that hardship. The Times might say we can be “forgiven” for not noticing this, but our failure to acknowledge the truth of white working-class voters’ experiences, in favor of instead seeking to explain their vote through our experiences, has contributed to the huge divides we are seeing today.
The bottom line is, unless we change our attitude and stop spending time trying to sum up these voters in far too simple ways but instead take seriously the economic defeat that shapes the mindsets of those whose lives are very different from ours, it’ll be hard to change the country’s direction.
While we have been focused on attributing their votes as completely as possible to attitudes about race, we have been unwilling to allow an alternative image of them into our awareness. In one of the same studies that Hasan cites as he paints a picture of racially motivated voters, we can also find a profile of a community that is in trouble. We should seek to understand this community and its grievances, not explain them away. Here is a snapshot of how the country looks to this group, taken from a study by PRRI/The Atlantic:
America’s Best Days. Americans are almost evenly split about whether America’s best days are in the past or future: half (50 percent) say America’s best days are behind us, while nearly as many (48 percent) say the country’s best days are ahead of us. The white working class is decidedly more pessimistic. More than six in ten (61 percent) white working-class Americans say America’s best days are in the past, while fewer than four in ten (37 percent) say they are yet to come.
The American Dream. Fewer than half (46 percent) of white working-class Americans believe the American Dream—if you work hard, you can get ahead—still holds true, while roughly as many (48 percent) say it was once but is no longer true. … These views stand in sharp contrast to white college-educated Americans, among whom about six in ten (62 percent) say the American Dream still holds true. Among the general public, half (50 percent) say the American Dream still holds true, while roughly four in ten (41 percent) say this dream once held true but does not anymore...
Drugs, Alcohol and Depression. Notably, white working-class Americans are twice as likely as white college-educated Americans to say someone in their family has struggled with substance abuse. Similar numbers of white working-class Americans report a family member has struggled with either alcoholism (12 percent) or drug addiction (8 percent). ... Nearly four in ten (38 percent) white working-class Americans, compared to 26 percent of white college-educated Americans, say they or someone in their household has experienced depression in the last 12 months.
Educational Investment. Americans overall are significantly more likely to say that a college education is a smart investment (55 percent) than to say it is more of a gamble that might not ultimately pay off (43 percent). White working-class Americans, however, are far more skeptical. A majority (54 percent) of the white working class view getting a college education as a risky gamble, while 44 percent say it is a smart investment. This puts them at odds with both white college-educated Americans and with black and Hispanic Americans, who have much more faith in the education system. Majorities of white college-educated Americans (63 percent), Hispanics (68 percent), and blacks (56 percent) believe a college education is a wise investment in the future.
Economic fatalism. White working-class voters who said that college education is a gamble were almost twice as likely to express a preference for Trump as those who said it was an important investment in the future.
This picture of the white working class can help us see them more fully and consider their views more thoughtfully. The good news is that progressivism has traditionally felt empathy when confronted with people’s pain and has a longstanding commitment to inclusivity. These habits should serve us well here. We can look proudly back on a history of building ever-expanding circles of diversity into American life—of showing compassion for those struggling to get ahead or even get by.
Today, we should know how to address the blind spot we’ve developed around this part of the American population, because we’ve done it before. Rather than explaining away their electoral choices, writing them out of our electoral equation, and pretending they won’t continue to be a dominant force in local, state and national elections for decades to come, it’s worth considering other options. We can denounce racism and still take seriously the economic realities in white working-class communities.
When the dust settles after November 6, there will once again be endless speculation about the outcome. Most of the political lines will no doubt be drawn exactly as they have been in the recent past.
If we want to learn from that past, though—if we want to truly move forward and not only improve electoral outcomes but also move the whole country in a direction that serves all Americans—we’ll have to learn to listen to those voices we have come to demonize, even though we may disagree on a range of things. If we want what’s best for our country, we’ll have to do so, whether it’s convenient or not.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/psychologists-reveal-common-bias-explains-why-so-many-people-believe-false-and
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/scientists-identify-key-cognitive-error-could-explain-why-people-believe
As absurd and patently false as it may be, the notorious Q Anon conspiracy theory has gained traction among a passionate portion of the United States in recent weeks and months. This should hardly be surprising given that the country elected Donald Trump, known widely for spinning racist conspiracy theories of President Barack Obama's place of birth.
But conspiracy theories are nothing new to American life. And according to new research, people may be susceptible to conspiracy theories — and other false ideologies like creationism — because of a rather simple cognitive error.
"We find a previously unnoticed common thread between believing in creationism and believing in conspiracy theories," says Sebastian Dieguez, a neuroscientist at the University of Fribourg, who described research newly published in the journal Cell Biology. "Although very different at first glance, both these belief systems are associated with a single and powerful cognitive bias named teleological thinking, which entails the perception of final causes and overriding purpose in naturally occurring events and entities."
Teleological thinking involves ascribing intentions and purposes to features of the world that may not have any consciousness or desires at all. One example Dieguez gave is the thought that the sun rises to provide us light — when in reality the sun appears to rise in the sky because of the Earth's rotation in the solar system.
These patterns of thought are "part of children’s earliest intuitions about the world," the authors, led by Pascal Wagner-Egger, note in the paper.
"This type of thinking is anathema to scientific reasoning, and especially to evolutionary theory, and was famously mocked by Voltaire, whose character Pangloss believed that 'noses were made to wear spectacles.'" said Dieguez. "Yet it is very resilient in human cognition, and we show that it is linked not only to creationism, but also to conspiracism."
One way to detect teleological thinking in individuals if to find that they subscribe to views such as, "Nothing happens by accident" or "Everything happens for a reason." The researchers found that these types of views correspond closely with a propensity to believe conspiracy theories.
But this kind of thinking also bears a striking resemblance to creationism — the view that Darwinian evolution by natural selection didn't occur and that life on Earth was specifically designed (by God, it is usually assumed) with the diversity of species that we see today.
It's worth noting that this view itself may carry with it the corresponding belief that evolutionary views are themselves the result of a conspiracy to deceive the public about the origins of life.
In a series of surveys, Dieguez and other researchers found that teleological thinking, conspiracy theories, and creationism were correlated — albeit sometimes only "modestly" — with one another.
"By drawing attention to the analogy between creationism and conspiracism, we hope to highlight one of the major flaws of conspiracy theories and therefore help people detect it, namely that they rely on teleological reasoning by ascribing a final cause and overriding purpose to world events," Dieguez says. "We think the message that conspiracism is a type of creationism that deals with the social world can help clarify some of the most baffling features of our so-called 'post-truth era.'"
Understanding how these beliefs propagate and why they are so compelling to people — even when, as in the case of Q Anon, they are so obviously nonsense — is critically important to find a way to prevent their spread. The researchers hope their work can help educators and communicators better refute and undermine false theories and beliefs.
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https://www.alternet.org/neuroscientist-explains-how-trump-supporters-are-easily-hoodwinked-because-one-psychological-problem
In the past, some prominent psychologists have explained President Donald Trump’s unwavering support by alluding to a well-established psychological phenomenon known as the “Dunning-Kruger effect.” The effect is a type of cognitive bias, where people with little expertise or ability assume they have superior expertise or ability. This overestimation occurs as a result of the fact that they don’t have enough knowledge to know they don’t have enough knowledge. Or, stated more harshly, they are “too dumb to know they are dumb.” This simple but loopy concept has been demonstrated dozens of times in well-controlled psychology studies and in a variety of contexts. However, until now, the effect had not been studied in one of the most obvious and important realms—political knowledge.
A new study published in the journal Political Psychology, carried out by the political scientist Ian Anson at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, not only found that the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to politics, it also appears to be exacerbated when partisan identities are made more salient. In other words, those who score low on political knowledge tend to overestimate their expertise even more when greater emphasis is placed on political affiliation.
Anson told PsyPost that he became increasingly interested in the effect after other academics were discussing its potential role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election on social media. “I follow a number of political scientists who marveled at the social media pundit class’ seeming display of ‘Dunning-Kruger-ish tendencies’ in their bombastic coverage of the election.” However, speculation by scientists does not always translate into statistically-significant findings, so Anson began thinking of ways to experimentally test what he described as a “very serious accusation.”
...
In order to have a large representative sample of subjects, Dr. Anson administered online surveys to over 2,600 Americans. The first survey was designed to assess political knowledge, while the second was used to examine how confident they were in their knowledge. Questions quizzed participants on topics like names of cabinet members, the length of term limits for members of Congress, and the names of programs that the U.S. government spends the least on.
As predicted, the results showed that those who scored low on political knowledge were also the ones who overestimated their level of knowledge. But that wasn’t all. When participants were given cues that made them engage in partisan thought, the Dunning-Kruger effect was made even stronger. This occurred with both Republicans and Democrats, but only in those who scored low on political knowledge to begin with.
These findings are fascinating but equally troubling. How do you combat ignorance when the ignorant believe themselves to be knowledgeable? Even worse, how do you fight it when America is becoming increasingly polarized, which certainly increases the salience of partisan identities?
While the results of Anson’s study suggest that being uninformed leads to overconfidence across the political spectrum, studies have shown that Democrats now tend to be generally more educated than Republicans, making the latter more vulnerable to the Dunning-Kruger effect. In fact, a Pew Research Center poll released in March of this year found that 54 percent of college graduates identified as Democrats or leaned Democratic, compared to 39 percent who identified or leaned Republican.
Perhaps this helps explain why Trump supporters seem to be so easily tricked into believing obvious falsehoods when their leader delivers his “alternative facts” sprinkled with language designed to activate partisan identities. Because they lack knowledge but are confident that they do not, they are less likely than others to actually fact-check the claims that the President makes.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is particularly worrisome when considering issues that poseexistential threats, like global warming.A 2017 study conducted at the University of New Hampshire found that only25 percent of self-described Trump supporters believed that human activities contribute to climate change.This speculation is supported by evidence from empirical studies. In 2016, an experiment found that 45 percent of Republicans believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels,” and a 2015 study similarly found that 54 percent of Republican primary voters believed then-president Barack Obama to be a Muslim.
This quirky cognitive bias could be making it easier for Donald Trump to continuously dupe his more uneducated followers. Not only are they uninformed, they are unlikely to ever try to become more informed on their own. In their minds, they have nothing new to learn.
While such a thought is disturbing, we should not lose all hope in trying to reach the victims of the Dunning-Kruger effect. At least one study found that incompetent students increased their ability to accurately estimate their class rank after being tutored in the skills they lacked. With the right education methods and a willingness to learn, the uninformed on both sides of the political aisle can gain a meta-awareness that can help them perceive themselves more objectively. Unfortunately, Anson’s study shows that getting through to these people becomes more and more difficult as the nation becomes more divided. And with Trump’s fiery rhetoric and fear mongering, that divide appears to always be growing wider, making one wonder whether Trump—through Googling himself—has become aware of the effect and is using it to his advantage. But that assumption might be giving him too much credit, as he is likely as much a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect as his followers.
Bobby Azarian is a neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping, and he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Follow him @BobbyAzarian.
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see haidt
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https://www.alternet.org/americas-patriotic-fervor-epidemic-problem-supported-gop
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psych shenkman bk, cogn diss
https://www.alternet.org/psychology-behind-trump-cult
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https://www.alternet.org/are-americans-broken-people-heres-why-weve-stopped-fighting-back-against-forces-oppression
Are Americans a Broken People? Here's Why We've Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression
A psychologist asks: Have consumerism, suburbanization and a malevolent corporate-government partnership so beaten us down that we no longer have the will to save ourselves?
By Bruce Levine / AlterNet June 4, 2018, 6:43 AM GMT
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States?
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?
Can anything be done to turn this around?
Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not "set them free" but instead further demoralize them?
Yes. It is called the "abuse syndrome." How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims' faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker. So the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.
Does knowing the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes?
No. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing; it can feel shameful -- and there is nothing more painful than shame. When one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action, but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one's humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.
Has such a demoralization happened in the U.S.?
In the United States, 47 million people are without health insurance, and many millions more are underinsured or a job layoff away from losing their coverage. But despite the current sellout by their elected officials to the insurance industry, there is no outpouring of millions of U.S. citizens on the streets of Washington, D.C., protesting this betrayal.
Polls show that the majority of Americans oppose U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the taxpayer bailout of the financial industry, yet only a handful of U.S. citizens have protested these circumstances.
Remember the 2000 U.S. presidential election? That's the one in which Al Gore received 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush. That's also the one that the Florida Supreme Court's order for a recount of the disputed Florida vote was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a politicized 5-4 decision, of which dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens remarked: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law." Yet, even this provoked few demonstrators.
When people become broken, they cannot act on truths of injustice. Furthermore, when people have become broken, more truths about how they have been victimized can lead to shame about how they have allowed it. And shame, like fear, is one more way we become even more psychologically broken.
U.S. citizens do not actively protest obvious injustices for the same reasons that people cannot leave their abusive spouses: They feel helpless to effect change. The more we don't act, the weaker we get. And ultimately to deal with the painful humiliation over inaction in the face of an oppressor, we move to shut-down mode and use escape strategies such as depression, substance abuse, and other diversions, which further keep us from acting. This is the vicious cycle of all abuse syndromes.
Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further?
Maybe.
Shortly before the 2000 U.S. presidential election, millions of Americans saw a clip of George W. Bush joking to a wealthy group of people, "What a crowd tonight: the haves and the haves-more. Some people call you the elite; I call you my base." Yet, even with these kind of inflammatory remarks, the tens of millions of U.S. citizens who had come to despise Bush and his arrogance remained passive in the face of the 2000 non-democratic presidential elections.
Perhaps the "political genius" of the Bush-Cheney regime was in their full realization that Americans were so broken that the regime could get away with damn near anything. And the more people did nothing about the boot slamming on their faces, the weaker people became.
What forces have created a demoralized, passive, dis-couraged U.S. population?
The U.S. government-corporate partnership has used its share of guns and terror to break Native Americans, labor union organizers, and other dissidents and activists. But today, most U.S. citizens are broken by financial fears. There is potential legal debt if we speak out against a powerful authority, and all kinds of other debt if we do not comply on the job. Young people are broken by college-loan debts and fear of having no health insurance.
The U.S. population is increasingly broken by the social isolation created by corporate-governmental policies. A 2006 American Sociological Review study ("Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades") reported that, in 2004, 25 percent of Americans did not have a single confidant. (In 1985, 10 percent of Americans reported not having a single confidant.) Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, describes how social connectedness is disappearing in virtually every aspect of U.S. life. For example, there has been a significant decrease in face-to-face contact with neighbors and friends due to suburbanization, commuting, electronic entertainment, time and money pressures and other variables created by governmental-corporate policies. And union activities and other formal or informal ways that people give each other the support necessary to resist oppression have also decreased.
We are also broken by a corporate-government partnership that has rendered most of us out of control when it comes to the basic necessities of life, including our food supply. And we, like many other people in the world, are broken by socializing institutions that alienate us from our basic humanity. A few examples:
Schools and Universities: Do most schools teach young people to be action-oriented -- or to be passive? Do most schools teach young people that they can affect their surroundings -- or not to bother? Do schools provide examples of democratic institutions -- or examples of authoritarian ones?
A long list of school critics from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, John Holt, Paul Goodman, Jonathan Kozol, Alfie Kohn, Ivan Illich, and John Taylor Gatto have pointed out that a school is nothing less than a miniature society: what young people experience in schools is the chief means of creating our future society. Schools are routinely places where kids -- through fear -- learn to comply to authorities for whom they often have no respect, and to regurgitate material they often find meaningless. These are great ways of breaking someone.
Today, U.S. colleges and universities have increasingly become places where young people are merely acquiring degree credentials -- badges of compliance for corporate employers -- in exchange for learning to accept bureaucratic domination and enslaving debt.
Mental Health Institutions: Aldous Huxley predicted today's pharmaceutical societyl "[I]t seems to me perfectly in the cards," he said, "that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude."
Today, increasing numbers of people in the U.S. who do not comply with authority are being diagnosed with mental illnesses and medicated with psychiatric drugs that make them less pained about their boredom, resentments, and other negative emotions, thus rendering them more compliant and manageable.
Oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) is an increasingly popular diagnosis for children and teenagers. The official symptoms of ODD include, "often actively defies or refuses to comply with adult requests or rules," and "often argues with adults." An even more common reaction to oppressive authorities than the overt defiance of ODD is some type of passive defiance -- for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Studies show that virtually all children diagnosed with ADHD will pay attention to activities that they actually enjoy or that they have chosen. In other words, when ADHD-labeled kids are having a good time and in control, the "disease" goes away.
When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a "passive-aggressive revolution" by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything -- this is one reason why the Soviet empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug "treatments" have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.
Television: In his book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), Jerry Mander (after reviewing totalitarian critics such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and Ivan Illich) compiled a list of the "Eight Ideal Conditions for the Flowering of Autocracy."
Mander claimed that television helps create all eight conditions for breaking a population. Television, he explained, (1) occupies people so that they don't know themselves -- and what a human being is; (2) separates people from one another; (3) creates sensory deprivation; (4) occupies the mind and fills the brain with prearranged experience and thought; (5) encourages drug use to dampen dissatisfaction (while TV itself produces a drug-like effect, this was compounded in 1997 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relaxing the rules of prescription-drug advertising); (6) centralizes knowledge and information; (7) eliminates or "museumize" other cultures to eliminate comparisons; and (8) redefines happiness and the meaning of life.
Commericalism of Damn Near Everything: While spirituality, music, and cinema can be revolutionary forces, the gross commercialization of all of these has deadened their capacity to energize rebellion. So now, damn near everything – not just organized religion -- has become "opiates of the masses."
The primary societal role of U.S. citizens is no longer that of "citizen" but that of "consumer." While citizens know that buying and selling within community strengthens that community and that this strengthens democracy, consumers care only about the best deal. While citizens understand that dependency on an impersonal creditor is a kind of slavery, consumers get excited with credit cards that offer a temporarily low APR.
Consumerism breaks people by devaluing human connectedness, socializing self-absorption, obliterating self-reliance, alienating people from normal human emotional reactions, and by selling the idea that purchased products -- not themselves and their community -- are their salvation.
Can anything be done to turn this around?
When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don't set them free. What sets them free is morale.
What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down.
The last people I would turn to for help in remobilizing a demoralized population are mental health professionals -- at least those who have not rebelled against their professional socialization. Much of the craft of relighting the pilot light requires talents that mental health professionals simply are not selected for nor are they trained in. Specifically, the talents required are a fearlessness around image, spontaneity, and definitely anti-authoritarianism. But these are not the traits that medical schools or graduate schools select for or encourage.
Mental health professionals' focus on symptoms and feelings often create patients who take themselves and their moods far too seriously. In contrast, people talented in the craft of maintaining morale resist this kind of self-absorption. For example, in the question-and-answer session that followed a Noam Chomsky talk (reported in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2002), a somewhat demoralized man in the audience asked Chomsky if he too ever went through a phase of hopelessness. Chomsky responded, "Yeah, every evening . . ."
If you want to feel hopeless, there are a lot of things you could feel hopeless about. If you want to sort of work out objectively what's the chance that the human species will survive for another century, probably not very high. But I mean, what's the point? . . . First of all, those predictions don't mean anything -- they're more just a reflection of your mood or your personality than anything else. And if you act on that assumption, then you're guaranteeing that'll happen. If you act on the assumption that things can change, well, maybe they will. Okay, the only rational choice, given those alternatives, is to forget pessimism."
A major component of the craft of maintaining morale is not taking the advertised reality too seriously. In the early 1960s, when the overwhelming majority in the U.S. supported military intervention in Vietnam, Chomsky was one of a minority of U.S. citizens actively opposing it. Looking back at this era, Chomsky reflected, "When I got involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, it seemed to me impossible that we would ever have any effect. . . So looking back, I think my evaluation of the 'hope' was much too pessimistic: it was based on a complete misunderstanding. I was sort of believing what I read."
An elitist assumption is that people don't change because they are either ignorant of their problems or ignorant of solutions. Elitist "helpers" think they have done something useful by informing overweight people that they are obese and that they must reduce their caloric intake and increase exercise. An elitist who has never been broken by his or her circumstances does not know that people who have become demoralized do not need analyses and pontifications. Rather the immobilized need a shot of morale.
no lnx
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https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bannons-firm-stole-millions-facebook-files-provoke-voters-trump-never-used-profiles
media frenzy and political umbrage over the apparent theft of upwards of 50 million Facebook user profiles in 2014 by Cambridge Analytica, a British-based voter targeting operation co-founded by Steve Bannon, to assist Trump’s 2016 campaign is overlooking a critical fact: Bannon’s data didn't deliver.
Cambridge Analytica developed psychological profiles of millions of American voters, yet its data wasn’t used by the Trump campaign in the runup to Election Day, its top officials have said. Apparently, the profiles weren't as current as Republican National Committee voter files, nor as effective as using Facebook’s platform for political advertising in 2016.
“When 60 Minutes asked Trump digital director Brad Parscale about Cambridge, though, he said that his team never actually used the data,” Colin Delany, an online media expert, noted Sunday for Epolitics.com. “Instead, they could target voters and potential donors more effectively using the information they gathered by actually running Facebook ads and measuring the results.”
The 2014 theft of the Facebook data—the subject of weekend exposes in the New York Times and abroad—also isn’t news.
That data breach, which raises all kinds of user privacy questions apart from the political arena, was first reported by the Guardian in late 2015. The Guardian then noted that Cambridge Analytica was using the pilfered data while backing Ted Cruz’s presidential bid.
“A little-known data company, now embedded within Cruz’s campaign and indirectly financed by his primary billionaire benefactor, paid researchers at Cambridge University to gather detailed psychological profiles about the US electorate using a massive pool of mainly unwitting US Facebook users built with an online survey,” the Guardian’s Harry Davies reported. The parent company boasted of its "massive data pool of 40+ million individuals across the United States—for each of whom we have generated detailed characteristic and trait profiles."
Nonetheless, the weekend reports in the New York Times and London newspaper, the Observer, have caused media and political firestorms. On Friday, Facebook announced it was suspending its relationship with Cambridge Analytica, prompting questions about why it hadn’t done so sooner if its user data had been stolen. Facebook also suspended the account of Christopher Wylie, a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower in the newspaper stories, drawing condemnation for what “they have known privately for two years.”
Meanwhile, on the domestic political front, there were calls for more investigations and regulatory oversight. A Democratic senator demanded that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee. A House Intelligence Committee Democrat echoed that demand. In Massachusetts, the state attorney general, another Democrat, announced she was launching an investigation. An ex-Federal Trade Commission official speculated that the Facebook breach may have violated a 2011 federal court order protecting user privacy, exposing the social media company to multi-millions in fines.
“One member of Parliament, Jo Stevens, said Facebook’s relationship with its users’ personal data ‘reminds me of an abusive relationship where there is coercive control going on,’” the Washington Post reported. “At another point in the [Parliament] hearing, fellow lawmaker Rebecca Pow questioned whether Facebook was a ‘massive surveillance operation.’”In Europe, the political hyperbole was even more extreme, because Cambridge Analytica worked for the pro-Brexit campaign, which won a British national vote to leave the European Union and pre-dated Trump’s election as president in November 2016.
Some Perspective, Please
Perhaps some of the outrage and umbrage comes from the growing realization that social media platforms aren’t just friendly places where like-minded people associate, but companies with an advertising business model based on surveillance, data collection and targeting audiences—whether selling consumer goods or political messages. Nonetheless, the current media and political frenzy is ignoring a critical point—that Trump’s campaign didn’t use Cambridge Analytica voter profiles because they weren’t as current or as effective as the RNC’s data and Facebook’s advertising platform.
In other words, Bannon’s creation is getting far too much attention and credit for being more powerful than it was. Moreover, if the public wants to understand how social media has become a powerful political messaging tool, people should pause and understand that Facebook’s profiling of users is not unique among online marketers.
What Cambridge Analytica did in 2014 to steal Facebook data was not that unique, although it apparently was on a larger scale. It was in line with what many businesses do to try to game the biggest platforms to increase their audience or sales, Delany noted, pulling back the curtain on so-called psychographic profiling.Epolitic.com’s Delany explains why: “Count me as a +1 for the 'massive surveillance operation' critique [of Facebook]—though we agree to the spying every time we log in,” he wrote Sunday. “Remember: if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product! Actually, the fact that Facebook collects so much data on its users and (functionally) rents it to anyone advertising on the platform goes a long way toward puncturing the hype around Cambridge and its psychographic social mapping.”
“The company ran afoul of Facebook because it used a quiz app to gather data from users’ Facebook accounts—and those of their friends,” he said. “This kind of ‘scraping’ was apparently allowed back in 2014, though most vendors used it on a smaller scale than Cambridge seems to have done. Cambridge basically aimed to reconstruct the web of relationships and personal information embedded in Facebook so that it could manipulate the data without going through Facebook’s data interface—and Facebook’s rules on what they could access and share.”
Bannon apparently sold the concept of psychological profiling to the billionaire Mercer family, as an unprecedented way to provoke and push the American electorate to the far right, which resulted in the Mercers pouring millions into Cambridge Analytica. But as Delany explains, psychographic targeting isn’t new—and crucially, it is supplanted by newer information, users’ daily keystrokes that render it increasingly obsolete.
Delany explained that there's nothing new about psychographic targeting. He continued:
“Vendors have been pitching it for years, usually basing their models on the same kinds of data that corporate brands both create and consume in bulk. Data experts I’ve talked with generally say that psychographic models can be useful in your first rounds of outreach, since they should give you at least an idea of whom to target.
“But at soon as you start to gather information about which people actually respond to a given message, the models have mostly done their jobs: you’ll quickly see the difference between who SHOULD click on something and who DOES click on it. What voters actually do matters more than what you think they MIGHT do: data derived directly from voters’ choices quickly supersedes models that try to predict their behavior. Think of polling vs. canvassing: polls help you estimate what people think, while canvassing lets them tell you.”
So the Trump campaign, under Parscale's direction, found it was more effective to use the Republican National Committee’s voter files in combination with Facebook’s audience-targeting supercomputers. As Delany noted, “Parscale’s team famously automated Facebook best practices on a vast scale—on some days, they ran more than 100,000 different ad/ad targeting variations, collecting far more useful data than Cambridge could provide and building their lists at the same time. Who needs a model once people’s fingers tell you what they think?”
That final thought is essentially what Parscale told CBS’s *60 Minutes*. On Sunday, CBS posted a report on its website fleshing out the details of that decision. Basically, the Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica as a fallback as it was unsure it would able to use the Republican National Committee data, which in turn, Trump’s campaign did use—and found, together with Facebook’s platform, that it was more effective.
Bannon’s hyped voter profiling was too good to be true. Like many aspects of Trump’s campaign that endure, it was hype, smoke and mirrors. But that hasn’t kept it from a starring role in a media and political firestorm that’s eclipsing the real issue: how social media has revolutionized political messaging.
Steven Rosenfeld
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https://www.alternet.org/world/why-denmark-dominates-world-happiness-rankings-year-after-year
new World Happiness Report again ranks Denmark among the top three happiest of 155 countries surveyed – a distinction that the country has earned for seven consecutive years.
The U.S., on the other hand, ranked 18th in this year’s World Happiness Report, a four-spot drop from last year’s report.
Denmark’s place among the world’s happiest countries is consistent with many other national surveys of happiness (or, as psychologists call it, “subjective well-being”).
Scientists like to study and argue about how to measure things. But when it comes to happiness, a general consensus seems to have emerged.
Depending on the scope and purpose of the research, happiness is often measured using objective indicators (data on crime, income, civic engagement and health) and subjective methods, such as asking people how frequently they experience positive and negative emotions.
Why might Danes evaluate their lives more positively? As a psychologist and native of Denmark, I’ve looked into this question.
Yes, Danes have a stable government, low levels of public corruption, and access to high-quality education and health care. Thecountry does have the the highest taxes in the world, but the vast majority of Danes happily pay: They believe higher taxes can create a better society.
Perhaps most importantly, however, they value a cultural construct called “hygge” (pronounced hʊɡə).
The Oxford dictionary added the word in June 2017, and it refers to high-quality social interactions. Hygge can be used as a noun, adjective or verb (to hygge oneself), and events and places can also be hyggelige (hygge-like).
Hygge is sometimes translated as “cozy,” but a better definition of hygge is “intentional intimacy,” which can happen when you have safe, balanced and harmonious shared experiences. A cup of coffee with a friend in front of a fireplace might qualify, as could a summer picnic in the park.
A family might have a hygge evening that entails board games and treats, or friends might get together for a casual dinner with dimmed lighting, good food and easygoing fun. Spaces can also be described as hyggelige (“Your new house is so hyggeligt”) and a common way of telling a host thank you after a dinner is to say that it was hyggeligt (meaning, we had a good time). Most Danish social events are expected to be hyggelige, so it would be a harsh critique to say that a party or dinner wasn’t hyggelige.
Research on hygge has found that in Denmark, it’s integral to people’s sense of well-being. It acts as abuffer against stress, while also creating a space to build camaraderie. In a highly individualized country like Denmark, hygge can promote egalitarianism and strengthen trust.
It would be fair to say that hygge is fully integrated into the Danish cultural psyche and culture. But it has also become a bit of a global phenomenon – Amazon now sells more than 900 books on hygge, and Instagram has over 3 million posts with the hashtag #hygge. Google trends data show a big jump in searches for hygge beginning in October 2016.
Nor is Denmark the only country that has a word for a concept similar to hygge – the Norwegians have koselig, the Swedes mysig, the Dutch gezenlligheid and the Germans gemütlichkeit.
In the U.S. – which also places a high value on individualism – there’s no real cultural equivalent of hygge. Income is generally associated with happiness; yet even though the country’s GDP has been rising and its unemployment rates have been declining, levels of happiness in the U.S. have been steadily decreasing.
What’s going on?
Income inequality continues to be an issue. But there’s also been a marked decrease in interpersonal trust and trust toward institutions like the government as well as the media. In the end, more disposable income doesn’t hold a candle to having someone to rely on in a time of need (something that 95 percent of Danes believe they have).
At its core, hygge is about building intimacy and trust with others.
Americans could probably use a little more of it in their lives.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Marie Helweg-Larsen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment
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https://www.alternet.org/culture/science-satire-and-lies-watching-colbert-can-fight-right-wing-brain-rot
In a National Rifle Association (NRA) TV ad from February of this year a man stands in front of a TV screen that airs a series of clips. Among them is a shot of John Oliver saying the words “National Rifle Association” and another of Alec Baldwin impersonating Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live. The rest of the shots are of talk shows, pundits or cable news reporting. As the clips roll, the man takes a sledgehammer to the TV and smashes it. Then a slogan appears: “The truth is our greatest weapon.”
It is a stunningly stupid ad. And it helps explain why the right keeps going after comedians.
It’s also a pretty funny ad, because what better way for the NRA to expose its penchant for aggressive hyperbole and its snowflake logic than to have a man sledgehammer a TV and equate that act with the “truth”? So according to NRA logic, their weapon is the truth, which is a sledgehammer that they will use on anyone who says things they don’t like. This is the ad they use to suggest they are being misrepresented as aggressive lunatics. Its irrationality is only outdone by its irony.
This weird habit of freaking out over comedians and suggesting that they are threatening the truth isn’t just the domain of the NRA. It’s a right-wing trend.
No one needs reminding of Donald Trump’s incessant agitation over Alec Baldwin’s impersonations of him for "SNL." Recall that Trump wasn’t just upset at the way that he was being presented as a bombastic fool (hardly a creative stretch); Trump also suggested that folks were “forced” to watch the impersonations, that the comedy was “one-sided” and “biased” and that he deserved “equal time.”
But one of the best recent examples of the right-wing witch-hunt over late night comedy came from House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, who didn’t take kindly to a recent sketch Stephen Colbert did on “The Late Show” that mocked him. Colbert traveled to Washington, D.C. to grill lawmakers about the investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. While there, he released his own redacted memo about Nunes.
Nunes later called into Neil Cavuto’s Fox Business show and called Colbert’s jokes a “danger” to the country. “Conservatives in this country are under attack,” Nunes said. “They attack people who are trying to get to the truth.”
Many of us are aware of the fact that Donald Trump is the most-mocked president in U.S. history. But the other side of the story is that this is the first time in our nation's history that comedians have so consistently been under attack across such a broad range of venues and in such a public way.
So, what is it about these comedians that has the right in such a tizzy?
Clearly, they don’t like being ridiculed. But that isn’t the main reason why these comedians feel like a threat. Instead, the real challenge comedians pose is to the right-wing version of the “truth” that is actually grounded in lies, B.S. and faulty logic. And what really makes the right’s antagonistic attitude towards comedians interesting is the fact that the comedians aren’t just challenging right-wing truth claims; they are thwarting the cognitive processes that lead us to accept right-wing falsehoods as true
Many of us have pointed out that the real threat to our nation caused by the Trump era is the mind warp it is causing. This is not only true for those who exhibit extreme belief bias and simply accept everything they hear on Fox News; it is also a problem for those of us who would like to remain critically analytical.
We now have significant evidence that the Trump era has created a cognitive load — a mental exhaustion on the nation — one that is so significant that fake news headlines can be taken as true if repeated enough. One study by Gordon Pennycook, Tyrone Cannon and David Rand on the cognitive processing of fake news stories showed that “increased perceptions of accuracy for repeated fake news headlines occurs even when the stories are labeled as contested by fact checkers, or are inconsistent with the reader’s political ideology.”
Back in early 2017, Maria Konnikova wrote a piece that explained what happens to the brain when it has to incessantly process lies. She cited research that shows that the brain has to first accept a lie as true, only to analyze it, then refute it. Over time, the brain tires of that process and slowly starts to accept the lies as true. She refers to a fascinating, if disheartening, 2015 study, that showed that if people repeated the phrase “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth” enough times, the Atlantic Ocean started to seem like the largest ocean on Earth.
This is all to show that there is now proof that the mainstreaming of lies in the Trump era is indeed rotting our brains. It was first thought that one way to prevent the spread of false information would be to flag it by third-party fact checking, but the study cited above showed that that effort did not sufficiently help.
And that’s where the comedians come in. Thus far there have been no studies that have compared cognitive processing of satire with cognitive processing of falsehoods. But there is significant research to show that it may well be true that the best cognitive defense against Trump era falsehoods is satirical comedy. We know, for instance, that those who consume sarcasm are smarter, more creative and better at reading context. All are useful tools to process lies.
What is most interesting is that processing falsehoods and processing certain types of satire appears to follow a very similar cognitive path. In both cases, the brain has to be able to distinguish between what is said and what is true. And in both cases the brain has to reconcile ambiguity, incongruence and the misuse of words. It further has to process tone, context and body language to infer meaning.
We knew back when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were on Comedy Central that their viewers were among the most informed on issues of any group consuming news. But now the role of satire in informing the public may be even more important — satirists may be the one thing that is keeping analytical thinkers engaged.
It’s important to note that sarcastic statements are like a true lie. “You’re saying something you don’t literally mean, and the communication works as intended only if your listener gets that you’re insincere,” explains Richard Chin.
What is perhaps most interesting about the way that satire works as a foil for Trump-era mental manipulations is that satire is designed to go after the three main ways our brains are constantly being duped: lies, B.S. and faulty logic.
In his first 406 days as president, Trump made 2,436 misleading or false claims. Most analysis of Trump’s false statements, like the running tab kept by The Washington Post, lumps his lies together with his bullshit — and that is a mistake. As Pennycook explains, “The difference between bulls**t and lying is that bulls**t is constructed without any concern for the truth. It’s designed to impress rather than inform. And then lying, of course, is very concerned with the truth — but subverting it.” Understood this way, it seems clear that Trump employs B.S. as much, if not more, than lies. Even better, he admits to it. He recently bragged that he just made up assertions of trade imbalances between the United States and Canada when talking to Justin Trudeau.
Flawed logic is a different thing altogether. These sorts of deceptions can take many forms, but as John Oliver pointed out, one of the Trump team’s favorites is whataboutism. "It implies that all actions regardless of context share a moral equivalency," says Oliver. "And since nobody is perfect, all criticism is hypocritical and everyone should do whatever they want.” Trump practiced whataboutism, for example, when he suggested that there were “many sides” to blame when a neo-Nazi intentionally drove a car into a mass of people and killed protestor Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.
In one example of satire mocking a Trump lie, Colbert called out Trump for claiming that his State of the Union address had the highest number of viewers in history. Colbert remained stunned that Trump needed to lie about his numbers and then decided to respond by using ironic exaggeration: “So let me just say right now, in advance, congratulations to President Trump on winning the Super Bowl. Well played . . . Also, you make a great Black Panther.”
But here is the really interesting part of the story. We know that fake news headlines, Trump B.S. and NRA skewed logic does in fact get cognitive traction even among those of us not predisposed to accept those falsehoods. Yet, those viewers who watch satire and other types of ironic comedy do not lose the ability to detect the ways that these comedians use creative deception to be funny. Why do we get tired of processing lies, but not of processing ironic comedy? And are satire consumers better at detecting falsehoods?
While more research is needed to fully make the case, there seem to be two main reasons why satire viewers may be better at detecting falsehoods than those who don’t consume this type of humor.
Satire viewers enjoy using their reflective cognitive abilities, which are effortful, typically deliberative and require working memory, over intuitive cognitive abilities, which don’t require higher order cognition. When I spoke with Pennycook about the potential of satire to serve as a defense against Trump era falsehoods, he remained skeptical that satire could strengthen mental fitness as a defense against falsehoods, but he did say that there may well be an overlap between people who are both willing and able to think analytically and satire viewers. “People do break down,” he explained, “according to the degree that they are willing and eager to engage in analytic reasoning.”
A number of studies have suggested that those who support right-wing ideology are more susceptible to bullshit, more governed by belief bias and less tolerant of irony and humorous exaggeration. But as the recent studies on fake news processing show, both the left and the right can fall for fake news. The critical difference, then, isn’t left or right political views, but analytical or intuitive thinkers.
The second part of the story is that processing humor cognitively involves pleasure. There is a cognitive reward for processing a joke that leads to laughter or amusement. Jokes engage both analytical and affective cognitive processes. Watching Samantha Bee or Colbert or Oliver dissect falsehoods is both analytically engaging and fun. The element of fun may be part of the reason why we keep getting the joke but can get worn down by incessant lies. When lies are processed through comedy, we don’t lose the ability to detect them as false.
And that may well be why these comedians keep being attacked as a danger to the NRA, the Trump agenda and right-wing extremism. Each time a comedian ironically makes fun of the right-wing mindset, they help engage our analytical thinking in a fun way.
The problem with the culture of lies — besides the cognitive toll it talks on all of us -- is that it may well be closely tied to a decline in democratic values. A study released this week by the Democracy Voter Study Group found that there is an alarming level of support for authoritarian rule among U.S. voters. Trump himself seems to have no real fondness for democracy, but we now know that only a slim majority of Americans (54 percent) consistently express a pro-democratic position. In addition, the highest levels of support for authoritarian leadership come from those who are disaffected, disengaged from politics, deeply distrustful of experts, culturally conservative and have negative attitudes toward racial minorities. That is also the same demographic that doesn’t like political satire and may even consider it “dangerous” to the nation.
It may be that the right’s real problem with late-night comedy isn’t that they can’t take a joke; it’s that they can’t take what a joke might do to their agenda.
Sophia A. McClennen is professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. Her latest book, co-authored with Remy M. Maisel, is, Is Satire Saving Our Nation? Mockery and American Politics.
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https://www.alternet.org/culture/how-trump-won-mindless-loyalty-millions-americans
Trump supporters are proud of their absolute faith in him. You see it in the way they beam proudly when they tell reporters that they’d support him no matter what he does. Now that’s unconditional love!
We have mixed feelings about absolute faith and unconditional love. Sometimes we regard them as the highest virtues. Sometimes we think such commitment is pretty dangerous. Unconditional? Would you still love a partner who turned into an ax murderer?
On the receiving end, absolute faith and unconditional love are pretty handy. Gaining that kind of unconditional respect means you can do no wrong, which frees you to do all the wrong you want.
So if you’re into that sort of thing, here’s all it takes to get it. And if you’re not into that sort of thing, here’s what to watch out for.
- Target people who can’t stand uncertainty: Go for the hungry, anxious, eager to believe; people who have had their fill of uncertainty and can’t stand anymore.
- Target people who don’t notice the downside of absolute faith: These are people who get all dewy eyed when thinking about faith, the kind who either ignore a faith they regard as wrong-headed or will tell you that wrong-headed faith is not really faith.
- Get their guard down: You’ll want people who see you as the answer to their prayers, people who want to align with you for a boost in their morale, status and prospects. Charm them. Listen to them and feed them whatever will satisfy them. The hungry are the easiest to eat.
- Make bold, vague statements that speak directly to them. (Trump’s “Make America Great” is a great example.) Great how? Your targets can fill in whatever comes to mind. Likewise, you can court someone personally with a line like, “Wow, I can really tell that you’ve got talent for understanding what’s going on!” Bold, flattering, vague. Suckers line right up.
- Include them in your “winner’s circle” with talk about the idiots "out there": Nothing wins faith like disparaging others. You see it at rallies where the speaker riles the audience by ridiculing everyone outside your circle. You can hear it in the way people flirt by confiding in you (yes you, because you’re wonderful!).
- Speak as though you are the absolute final, neutral judge of reality. Don’t ever qualify what you say; it’s not your opinion, it’s truth. That will annoy careful thinkers. but they’re not your targets. It will win gullible thinkers, but only if they agree with you already. They’ll agree with you if you’re sufficiently vague (see #4).
- Dog whistle: Keep your pandering to your targets and your attacks on others under the radar, so you can always deny them if challenged.
- Make it easy to align with you, costly to break with you: Don’t ask your targets to make sacrifices. Once you’ve hooked them they’ll make all sorts of sacrifices. Make all of their first encounters with you self-affirming fun for them and make the alternative, not aligning with you, seem like nothing but a hassle.
- Appear invincible: Your targets want to believe you, so make it easy for them. Prove you are right, absolutely and always (by your “authoritative” standards). Remember, there is absolutely nothing that can’t be mocked, attacked or vilified. It’s easy. Just pick apart anything that suggests you’re wrong.
- Heads you win, tails you lose: Any good news affirms that you’re right. Any bad news affirms you’re the victim of persecution.
- Avenge tenfold: Be savage. Be relentless. Don’t let anyone get away with saying anything bad about you. Make sure that anyone who tries has at least 10 times more bad things said about them. Gaslight like crazy.
- Police morality as though you’re a crusader for reality: Above all you are always the morality police. If you hate immorality in others, the gullible will believe that you must be morally pure.
What’s nice about these rules is that it doesn’t matter what you know or think. Following them frees you from careful thought. That’s the beauty of it! You can apply these to win absolute faith and unconditional love from the gullible in support of anything. It doesn’t matter whether you offer anything for them to have faith in, since your targets are the kind who have faith in faith. Remember, they consider it a relief to no longer have to keep an eye on things—a relief from dreaded uncertainty.
Jeremy Sherman is a decision theorist studying how life deals with dilemmas from the origins of life to everyday and political life.
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https://www.c-span.org/video/?441518-1/enlightenment-now
FEBRUARY 27, 2018
Enlightenment Now
Experimental cognitive scientist and bestselling author Steven Pinker explored the thought processes behind extremism and authoritarianism.
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am torture pgm mitchell and jessen FEAR pgm
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-march-19-2018/
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https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/scientists-have-established-link-between-brain-damage-and-religious-fundamentalism
study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.
Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.
Religious fundamentalism refers to an ideology that emphasizes traditional religious texts and rituals and discourages progressive thinking about religion and social issues. Fundamentalist groups generally oppose anything that questions or challenges their beliefs or way of life. For this reason, they are often aggressive towards anyone who does not share their specific set of supernatural beliefs, and towards science, as these things are seen as existential threats to their entire worldview.
Since religious beliefs play a massive role in driving and influencing human behavior throughout the world, it is important to understand the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism from a psychological and neurological perspective.
To investigate the cognitive and neural systems involved in religious fundamentalism, a team of researchers—led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University—conducted a study that utilized data from Vietnam War veterans that had been gathered previously. The vets were specifically chosen because a large number of them had damage to brain areas suspected of playing a critical role in functions related to religious fundamentalism. CT scans were analyzed comparing 119 vets with brain trauma to 30 healthy vets with no damage, and a survey that assessed religious fundamentalism was administered. While the majority of participants were Christians of some kind, 32.5% did not specify a particular religion.
Based on previous research, the experimenters predicted that the prefrontal cortex would play a role in religious fundamentalism, since this region is known to be associated with something called ‘cognitive flexibility’. This term refers to the brain’s ability to easily switch from thinking about one concept to another, and to think about multiple things simultaneously. Cognitive flexibility allows organisms to update beliefs in light of new evidence, and this trait likely emerged because of the obvious survival advantage such a skill provides. It is a crucial mental characteristic for adapting to new environments because it allows individuals to make more accurate predictions about the world under new and changing conditions.
Brain imaging research has shown that a major neural region associated with cognitive flexibility is the prefrontal cortex—specifically two areas known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Additionally, the vmPFC was of interest to the researchers because past studies have revealed its connection to fundamentalist-type beliefs. For example, one study showed individuals with vmPFC lesions rated radical political statements as more moderate than people with normal brains, while another showed a direct connection between vmPFC damage and religious fundamentalism. For these reasons, in the present study, researchers looked at patients with lesions in both the vmPFC and the dlPFC, and searched for correlations between damage in these areas and responses to religious fundamentalism questionnaires.
According to Dr. Grafman and his team, since religious fundamentalism involves a strict adherence to a rigid set of beliefs, cognitive flexibility and open-mindedness present a challenge for fundamentalists. As such, they predicted that participants with lesions to either the vmPFC or the dlPFC would score low on measures of cognitive flexibility and trait openness and high on measures of religious fundamentalism.
The results showed that, as expected, damage to the vmPFC and dlPFC was associated with religious fundamentalism. Further tests revealed that this increase in religious fundamentalism was caused by a reduction in cognitive flexibility and openness resulting from the prefrontal cortex impairment. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using a standard psychological card sorting test that involved categorizing cards with words and images according to rules. Openness was measured using a widely-used personality survey known as the NEO Personality Inventory. The data suggests that damage to the vmPFC indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by suppressing both cognitive flexibility and openness.
These findings are important because they suggest that impaired functioning in the prefrontal cortex—whether from brain trauma, a psychological disorder, a drug or alcohol addiction, or simply a particular genetic profile—can make an individual susceptible to religious fundamentalism. And perhaps in other cases, extreme religious indoctrination harms the development or proper functioning of the prefrontal regions in a way that hinders cognitive flexibility and openness.
The authors emphasize that cognitive flexibility and openness aren’t the only things that make brains vulnerable to religious fundamentalism. In fact, their analyses showed that these factors only accounted for a fifth of the variation in fundamentalism scores. Uncovering those additional causes, which could be anything from genetic predispositions to social influences, is a future research project that the researchers believe will occupy investigators for many decades to come, given how complex and widespread religious fundamentalism is and will likely continue to be for some time.
By investigating the cognitive and neural underpinnings of religious fundamentalism, we can better understand how the phenomenon is represented in the connectivity of the brain, which could allow us to someday inoculate against rigid or radical belief systems through various kinds of mental and cognitive exercises.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/03/05/why-some-conservatives-are-blind-climate-change
Imagine this: A young professional couple at a party mentions they’re thinking of buying a home in a popular waterfront neighbourhood that scientists have found is vulnerable to coastal flooding.
That flood risk is made extra clear by murals in the neighbourhood marking the predicted water level rise. What’s more, media headlines have warned about sea level rise daily during the past week.
So, what gives? Can the young couple just not see the evidence in front of them?
In recent years, we have been exposed to an abundance of information about climate change. This often takes the form of news articles about carbon emissions and the hurricanes, floods and forest fires bolstered by climate change.
Despite the strong evidence that human activities are contributing to climate change, a small minority of the public disagrees with the scientific consensus.
Do You See What I See?
In the face of the evidence, how can we explain this division?
As psychology researchers, we wondered whether some people are just blind to cues of climate risk.
When we’re confronted by visually crowded settings, we tend to notice emotional words and tune out others. For example, if you were presented a series of words appearing one after another in quick succession — 10 words per second — you would struggle to name all of them. But you would be more likely to catch a word like “danger” than a neutral one.
We set up exactly that kind of scenario in our study. We recruited university students, as well as people in shopping malls in the Vancouver area and in Kamloops, B.C. Then we showed each of them a rapid sequence of words and asked them to pick out two targets, such as a set of digits (555555555) and a word in green font, in the sequence.
Due to limits in our visual system, once the first target has appeared, people are unable to “see” the second target if it appears too soon after the first. This phenomenon is called the attentional blink. It’s as if the mind blinks after the first target, preventing you from seeing the second.
But things change when emotional words are used. Previous research has shown that if the second target is emotionally arousing, then people are better able to see it than if it is neutral — compare the words murder and keyboard, for example.
When we modified the test to measure people’s attention to climate change, we found people who are concerned about climate change are better at seeing climate-related words, such as carbon, right after the first target than those who are less concerned.
We also asked participants about their political orientation, income, education, religion, profession, experience with natural disasters and whether they owned a home near sea level.
When we analyzed the data, we found a pattern: Conservatives who were less concerned about climate change were less likely to see climate-related words than liberals who were worried about the issue.
In short, conservatives showed climate change blindness.
Targeted Communication
Now that we know people’s political orientation affects their visual attention to climate change, this raises a possible feedback loop, where concerned liberals readily tune their attention to news headlines about climate change and become even more concerned.
But unconcerned conservatives may be more blind to the same headlines about climate change and therefore become more entrenched in their disbelief.
The visual blindness can further deepen the denial of the real risks of climate change such as flooding, hurricanes, drought and heatwaves, and consequently a lack of action to mitigate climate change.
If we’re to be successful communicating the risks of climate change to conservatives, we may need to go about it in a different way. Communications about climate change must tailor the climate-related information to the audience, especially those who are conservative or unconcerned.
We can do this by using messages that align with people’s political ideologies and personal values.
For example, we can frame climate change action as protecting our nation against climate catastrophes, advancing economic and technological development and creating a more caring and considerate society, which is an effective message to engage climate deniers. Framing environmentalism as a form of patriotism can be successful, particularly if the appeal is seen as coming from one’s in-group.
It’s always hard to get someone’s attention, but if the messaging is in line with their personal values and motivations, they will take notice.
Jiaying Zhao is Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia; Jennifer Whitman is Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, and Rebecca M. Todd is Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undoing_Project
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds is a 2016 nonfiction book by American author Michael Lewis, published by W.W. Norton. The Undoing Project explores the close partnership of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work on heuristics in judgment and decision-making demonstrated common errors of the human psyche, and how that partnership eventually broke apart. The book revisits Lewis' interest in market inefficiencies, previously explored in his books Moneyball (2003), The Big Short (2010), and Flash Boys (2014). It was acclaimed by book critics.
Reception
According to the review aggregator Bookmarks, The Undoing Project was met largely by rave reviews,[1] with Glenn C. Altschuler arguing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that it "may well be his best book."[2] Writing in The New Yorker, law professor Cass Sunstein and economist Richard Thaler praised the book's ability to explain complex concepts to lay readers as well as turn the biographies of Tversky and Kahneman into a page-turner: "He provides a basic primer on the research of Kahneman and Tversky, but almost in passing; what is of interest here is the collaboration between two scientists."[3] Jennifer Senior of The New York Times wrote that "At its peak, the book combines intellectual rigor with complex portraiture. During its final pages, I was blinking back tears, hardly your typical reaction to a book about a pair of academic psychologists."[4]
References
- Jump up "Bookmarks reviews of The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis". LitHub. Retrieved February 8, 2017.
- Jump up Altschuler, Glenn C. (January 15, 2017). "'The Undoing Project': How two Israeli psychologists changed the world". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved February 8, 2017.
- Jump up Cass Sustein and Richard Thaler (December 7, 2016). "The Two Friends Who Changed How We Think About How We Think". The New Yorker. Retrieved February 10, 2017.
- Jump up Jennifer Senior (December 1, 2016). "Michael Lewis on Two Well Matched (but Finally Mismatched) Men". The New York Times. Retrieved February 10, 2017.
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nyt
cf new yorker
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In the fall of 1969, behind the closed door of an otherwise empty seminar room at Hebrew University, two psychologists began a collaboration that would upend the understanding of human behavior. Those first conversations were filled with uproarious laughter and occasional shouting, in a jumble of Hebrew and English, which could sometimes be heard from the hallway.
When it came time for the two professors to write up their papers, they would sit next to each other at a single typewriter. “We were sharing a mind,” one would say later. They flipped a coin to decide whose name would appear first on their initial paper and alternated thereafter. The two names were Amos Tversky — the winner of that coin flip — and Daniel Kahneman.
Their work revealed previously undiscovered patterns of human irrationality: the ways that our minds consistently fool us and the steps we can take, at least some of the time, to avoid being fooled. Kahneman and Tversky used the word “heuristics” to describe the rules of thumb that often lead people astray. One such rule is the “halo effect,” in which thinking about one positive attribute of a person or thing causes observers to perceive other strengths that aren’t really there. Another is “representativeness,” which leads people to see cause and effect — to see a “narrative” — where they should instead accept uncertainty or randomness.
Continue reading the main story
The research of Kahneman and Tversky has become some of the most influential social science of the past century. It has helped to reorder economics by exposing the folly of economists’ belief in an unconsciously rational human mind. The work has also led to advances in medical diagnosis and patient behavior. It has affected eating habits, cellphone use by drivers, retirement savings and many other areas.
The work is also full of practical little ideas. “No one ever made a decision because of a number,” Kahneman has said. “They need a story.” Or Tversky’s theory of socializing: Because stinginess and generosity are both contagious, and because behaving generously makes you happier, surround yourself with generous people.
One of the clearest places to see their work’s impact, although surely not the most important, is professional sports. Team executives have realized that some of their long-held assumptions about what makes a great athlete or a winning strategy turn out to be wrong. And they have adjusted. The adjustments have not always worked, and many of the old beliefs — say, the importance of fielding skill among catchers in baseball — contain wisdom. Yet the reformist movement has had many more wins than losses. One reformer is Theo Epstein, the executive who has overseen the demise of mythical curses on both the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs.
The changes in sports are known as the Moneyball revolution, after the title of a 2003 book by Michael Lewis, about the low-budget success of the Oakland Athletics. One review of “Moneyball” particularly caught Lewis’s eye, because it offered a criticism that had not occurred to him. Writing in The New Republic, two academics — Richard Thaler, an economist who had helped overthrow his field’s hyperrationality, and Cass Sunstein, a law professor — argued that Lewis had missed a larger story: The success of the A’s could trace its intellectual roots not only through the world of baseball’s analytical geeks but also back to the work of Kahneman and Tversky.
“Until that moment I don’t believe I’d ever heard of either Kahneman or Tversky,” Lewis now writes. “My book wasn’t original. It was simply an illustration of ideas that had been floating around for decades and had yet to be fully appreciated by, among others, me.” Lewis set about learning more about the psychologists, and the result is his latest book, “The Undoing Project,” a joint biography of Kahneman and Tversky, and a discussion of their ideas and complex relationship.
Lewis is the ideal teller of the story. Dating to his 1989 debut, “Liar’s Poker,” about the Wall Street boom of that decade, he has displayed a rare combination for a writer. He immerses himself in big ideas — about finance, technology, sports and, ultimately, the human condition — and then explains them to readers with sophistication and clarity. But he is also a vastly better raconteur than most other writers playing the explication game. You laugh when you read his books. You see his protagonists in three dimensions — deeply likable, but also flawed, just like most of your friends and family.
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Kahneman and Tversky are no longer obscure figures, thanks in part to Kahneman’s bestselling “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Yet their story is still not well known. They were both grandsons of rabbis from Eastern Europe, and both atheists. They were deeply affected by their service in the Israeli military — including in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, after they had already established themselves as academics. The experiences helped make Kahneman far more practical than he otherwise might have been, because he understood that psychology could save, or cost, lives.
For Tversky, military service sharpened the brazenness that became crucial to their collaboration. At one time, against the orders of a superior, he rushed over to a fellow soldier who had collapsed near an unexploded grenade and pulled the soldier to safety. “Once I did that,” he later told a friend, “I felt obliged to keep this image of hero.” His confidence and brilliance combined to make for a cutting sense of humor. After he had given a talk, an English statistician approached him and said, “I don’t usually like Jews, but I like you.” Tversky responded, “I usually like Englishmen, but I don’t like you.”
Tversky’s panache made him the more prominent of the pair, by a considerable margin, while they were doing their work. The gap aggravated tensions that existed between the two men despite what Lewis describes as a platonic love between them. Many of today’s readers, of course, know only Kahneman’s name. The back story is tragically affecting: Tversky died of cancer in 1996, at the age of 59. He received the diagnosis just after he and Kahneman had severed their friendship, only to repair it in Tversky’s last months.
For all of the personal anguish that their differences created, those differences also fueled their accomplishments. Tversky’s boldness helped the pair to take on strongly held beliefs in one field after another. Kahneman’s humility and insecurity were just as important to their success. He was unsparingly self-critical, which allowed him to understand his own mental errors — and, by extension, to diagnose widespread human errors that others had missed. Kahneman came to realize that when he was faced with results from studying 40 subjects, a typical sample in psychology, his instinct was to devise an explanation for the results. In truth, the most likely explanation was statistical noise.
If you want to conduct your own experiment along these lines, ask someone to write down the results of a hypothetical sequence of 20 coin flips. Then ask the person to flip a coin 20 times and write down the results. The actual flips will almost certainly contain long streaks of only heads or tails — the sort of streaks that people don’t think a random coin produces on its own. This kind of misconception leads us to misanalyze all sorts of situations, in business, politics and everyday life. Lewis, describing one of Kahneman and Tversky’s real-life disciples, writes, “He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”
That notion — reflected in the book’s title — is one of the most important that Lewis offers, especially now. Many people attracted to Kahneman and Tversky’s ideas have a little bit of Amos Tversky’s brashness in them. They (in fairness, I should say “we”) get some enjoyment from puncturing shibboleths with data and observation. As a result, they are often seen as arrogant and sometimes are indeed arrogant.
I read “The Undoing Project” during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign and its aftermath. In many ways, the campaign’s result and its winner represented the antitheses of Kahneman and Tversky’s work. The election was a victory for gut instinct over empiricism, for cynicism over reason.
But the full message of Kahneman and Tversky’s work, I think, is more subtle than it often seems — and even more important in the new political world than the old. The human species is fantastically complex and often doesn’t know what it is doing. The search for a better understanding of our behavior is vital. It’s also difficult, never-ending and still very much worth the struggle.
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see superwicked lazarus?
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-dire-climate-warnings-boost
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Feinberg and Willer found that participants primed to have a stronger belief in a just world reported levels of skepticism that were 29 percent higher, and a willingness to reduce their carbon footprint that was 21 percent lower, than those primed to see the world as an unjust place. Their findings are reported in Psychological Science.
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2 aug 11
There's a study running soon in the journal Global Environmental Change called "Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States." It analyzes poll and survey data from the last 10 years and finds that ... are you sitting down? ... conservative white men are far more likely to deny the threat of climate change than other people.
OK, that's no surprise to anyone who's been awake over the last decade. But the paper goes beyond that to put forward some theories about why conservative white men (CWM) are so loathe to accept climate change. The explanation is some mix of the following, all of which overlap in various ways:
- First there's the "white male effect" -- generally speaking, white males are less concerned with a variety of risks. This probably has to do with the fact that they are less exposed to risk than other demographics, what with running things and all.
- Then, as Chris Mooney notes, there's the "social dominance orientation" of conservatives, who see social life as following the law of the jungle. One's choice is to dominate or be dominated; that is the natural order of things. Such folk are leery of climate change solutions premised on fairness or egalitarianism.
- Then there are the well-understood "system-justifying tendencies" of conservatives. The authors explain that conservatives ...
... strongly display tendencies to justify and defend the current social and economic system. Conservatives dislike change and uncertainty and attempt to simplify complexity. Further, conservative white males have disproportionately occupied positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should not be surprising that conservative white males' strong system-justifying attitudes would be triggered to deny climate change.
- Finally, there's "identity-protective cognition," a notion borrowed from Dan Kahan at Yale. (See this PDF.) Here's how Kahan and colleagues sum it up:
We propose that variance in risk perceptions -- across persons generally, and across race and gender in particular -- reflects a form of motivated cognition through which people seek to deflect threats to identities they hold, and roles they occupy, by virtue of contested cultural norms.
"Motivated cognition" refers to reasoning done in service of justifying an already held belief or goal. It helps explain why the CWM who know the most about climate science are the most likely to reject it; they learn about it in order to reject it. See Chris Mooney's great piece on that. Point being: when facts (or the implications of those facts) threaten people's social identities, they tend to dismiss the facts rather than the identity.
To all these reasons, I'd add "epistemic closure," the extraordinary way that the modern right has constructed a self-contained, hermetically sealed media environment in which conservatives can be protected from ever encountering a contrary view. It's an accelerant to all the tendencies described above.
Anyway, as you can see, the rejection of climate science among CWM is basically overdetermined. Climate change threatens their values, their privileges, and their worldview. They are reacting as one would expect them to react.
So what? What follows from this? I'll address that in my next post.
David Roberts is staff writer for Grist.
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another version
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/climate-change-gop_b_916701.html
But that is precisely the label they are given, somewhat facetiously, in the title of a new study -- "Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States" -- about the war over climate change. The study confirms what many others have suggested, that conservative white males (CWMs) are more likely than any other segment of the population to deny the overwhelming body of science that anthropogenic climate change is underway, and a serious threat to the biosphere and everything in it, including human beings. This is not surprising.
What is valuable about this study is what it says not just about conservative white men, but about all of us. This research confirms that who we are as people, at really fundamental levels, has a lot more to do with the way we see things than just the facts. All of us, not just CWMs. And not just on climate change. And what that means is that arguing issues based just on the facts isn't going to get us very far, since the facts aren't really what we're arguing about in the first place.
Here are a few of the findings (based on analysis of Gallup surveys of public opinion between 2000 and 2010);
- 14% of the general public doesn't worry about climate change at all, but among CWMs the percentage jumps to 39%.
- 32% of adults deny there is a scientific consensus on climate change, but 59% of CWMs deny what the overwhelming majority of the world's scientists have said.
- Three adults in 10 don't believe recent global temperature increases are primarily caused by human activity. Twice that many -- six CWMs out of every 10 -- feel that way
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