Pleated-Jeans has done the heavy lifting to pull the old, outdated Maslow diagram into the 21st century:
H/T to Michael O’Connor Clarke who advises “Caution: may cause psych majors to eject hot coffee through nasal passages.”
July 15, 2010
Pleated-Jeans identifies the modern Maslow’s hierarchy
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June 18, 2010
When it’s rational to be irrational
Cory Doctorow really likes Dan Ariely’s The Upside of Irrationality:
. . . there are sections in which the science of irrationality is readily converted into practical techniques for living better, and these really shine. My favorite is the section on adaptation, that is, the way in which both terrible pain and incredible delights fade down to a kind of baseline normal over time. Ariely points out that adaptation can be slowed or even prevented through intermittent exposure to the underlying stimulus — that is, if you take a break, the emotional sensation comes back with nearly full force.
Here’s where our intuitive response is really wrong: we have a tendency to indulge our pleasures without respite, and to take frequent breaks from those things that make us miserable. This is exactly backwards. If you want to maximize your pleasure — a great dessert, the delight of furnishing your first real apartment after graduation, a wonderful new relationship — you should trickle it into your life, with frequent breaks for your adaptive response to diminish. If you want to minimize your pain — an unpleasant chore, an awful trip — you should continue straight through without a break, because every time you stop, your adaptive response resets and you experience the discomfort anew.
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May 19, 2010
QotD: Action movie lines
“I know what you’re thinking, punk: Did I fire six bullets or only five. Being this is a Glock with seventeen rounds, it’s a moot point, but I’m doing a cognitive psychology study on people’s ability to count in stressful situation. You’ll get twenty dollars to participate. So, do you feel like helping science? Well, do ya, punk?”
Frank J. Fleming, “Action Movie Lines”, IMAO, 2010-05-18
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March 31, 2010
What “everybody knows” ain’t necessarily so
Rebecca L. Burch reviews Susan Pinker’s 2008 book The Sexual Paradox:
By page four, Pinker throws out the question of why women may or may not be allowed to be equal to men and posits a different one: why on earth do men get to be the standard? Why should females have the goal of meeting the male standard? This in itself denigrates females. So many books discuss how females are discouraged, disenfranchised, and disenchanted, citing numbers of women leaving traditionally “male” careers. Pinker dares to posit the idea that women don’t have the same preferences as men and therefore, might actually choose different paths, not be forced into them by the patriarchy. Now we’re talking! Let’s throw out the seemingly societal mandates and all that socialization and delve into actual differences, not perceptions or relative status, but the biology of the matter. Pinker “…began to wonder what would happen if all the ‘shoulds’ — the policy and political agendas — were shifted to the side for a moment to examine the science” (p. 5).
And that she does, spending little time on history and the patriarchy, Pinker explains the neurological and endocrinological processes that result in different talents and predispositions (with plenty of overlap) as well as different preferences. Thankfully, she goes beyond just differences in performance, assessment, or feelings regarding these differences. In particular, she examines the role testosterone plays in male risk taking (including those amusing Darwin Awards) and the role oxytocin and empathy play in female career choices. It is important to note that this is not the shallow glossing over seen in other books. Pinker is thorough enough to leave this biopsychologist satisfied, but also understandable enough for nonacademics.
[. . .]
After systematically breaking down each of these misconceptions about gender, gender differences, and the power of society, Pinker sums things up this way, “…forty years of discounting biology have led us to a strange and discomfiting place, one where women are afraid to own up to their desires and men—despite their foibles—are seen as standard issue” (p. 254). This belief of men as standard issue, and the assumption that women want this, only makes the situation harder for women. This may not be what they want, even if they are highly intelligent, capable, and encouraged. And most importantly, they are entitled to their preferences. This “vanilla male” model is also of no use to those disadvantaged males (those with Asperger’s, for example), whose ability examine concepts differently have usually come at a social price. They, also, are entitled to their preferences and should be given the opportunity to explore their skills. Once again, the belief in the SSSM [standard social science model] has set us back. This active disregard of biology and evolution has not improved gender equality. It has done just the just the opposite and even hindered a subset of males in the process.
H/T to Arts & Letters Daily for the link.
March 30, 2010
Self-esteem versus self-respect
Theodore Dalrymple on the crucial differences between self-esteem and self-respect:
With the coyness of someone revealing a bizarre sexual taste, my patients would often say to me, “Doctor, I think I’m suffering from low self-esteem.” This, they believed, was at the root of their problem, whatever it was, for there is hardly any undesirable behavior or experience that has not been attributed, in the press and on the air, in books and in private conversations, to low self-esteem, from eating too much to mass murder.
[. . .]
When people speak of their low self-esteem, they imply two things: first, that it is a physiological fact, rather like low hemoglobin, and second, that they have a right to more of it. What they seek, if you like, is a transfusion of self-esteem, given (curiously enough) by others; and once they have it, the quality of their lives will improve as the night succeeds the day. For the record, I never had a patient who complained of having too much self-esteem, and who therefore asked for a reduction. Self-esteem, it appears, is like money or health: you can’t have too much of it.
Self-esteemists, if I may so call those who are concerned with the levels of their own self-esteem, believe that it is something to which they have a right. If they don’t have self-esteem in sufficient quantity to bring about a perfectly happy life, their fundamental rights are being violated. They feel aggrieved and let down by others rather than by themselves; they ascribe their lack of rightful self-esteem to the carping, and unjustified, criticism of parents, teachers, spouses, and colleagues.
The other side of the coin is rather different:
Self-respect is another quality entirely. Where self-esteem is entirely egotistical, requiring that the world should pay court to oneself whatever oneself happens to be like or do, and demands nothing of the person who wants it, self-respect is a social virtue, a discipline, that requires an awareness of and sensitivity to the feelings of others. It requires an ability and willingness to put oneself in someone else’s place; it requires dignity and fortitude, and not always taking the line of least resistance.
[. . .]
Self-respect requires fortitude, one of the cardinal virtues; self-esteem encourages emotional incontinence that, while not actually itself a cardinal sin, is certainly a vice, and a very unattractive one. Self-respect and self-esteem are as different as depth and shallowness.
March 1, 2010
Christopher Hitchens’ retrospective on the life of Alexander Haig
Christopher Hitchens does not come to praise (a would-be) Caesar, but to bury him . . . good and deep:
“Nobody has a higher opinion of General Alexander Haig than I do,” I once wrote. “And I think he is a homicidal buffoon.” I did not then realize that this view of mine was at least partly shared by so many senior figures on the American right.
When I moved to Washington in the very early years of Ronald Reagan’s tenure, I was pretty sure that Haig, then secretary of state, was delusional (and not even in a good way). What I would not have believed then was what has become apparent since — that his boss, Ronald Reagan, often felt the same way.
And this is the nice part of the biography. Go read the whole thing.
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February 23, 2010
Own the podium? Pwned!
The much-criticized, so-called unCanadian “Own the Podium” dream is done, stick a fork in it:
Own The Podium has officially gone from a winning blueprint to wishful thinking.
Chris Rudge, CEO of the Canadian Olympic Committee, conceded Monday the goal of finishing first in the medal standings at the Vancouver Games is not going to happen.
“There’s going to be a lot of questions asked about Own The Podium,” Rudge acknowledged. “We will eviscerate this program in every detail when we’re finished. It’s painful to go into the autopsy while the patient is still alive and kicking.
“We’ll quantify the success of the program in terms of total medals after the Games are over. We’re still working as hard as we can to make sure these athletes get the support they need and know we are behind them.”
The Canadian public invested heavily in OTP. Of the $117 million invested in athletes, $66 million of it was taxpayer dollars. VANOC, the organizing committee for the Games, covered most of the remainder through corporate sponsorships.
Canada finished Monday with 10 medals (5-4-1), in fifth place and far behind the Americans with 25. The Germans were second with 21 followed by Norway with 14 and Russia with 11.
In some ways I’m surprised that nobody is winding their collective watches over the “dearth” of bronze medal performances by Canadian athletes: of the 10 medals won so far, only one of them was bronze. If you’re looking for silly things to worry about, isn’t that a good placeholder?
Update: Adriana Barton talks about the odd phenomena where bronze medal winners are often happier than silver medallists.
Third-place winners have upward thoughts (“at least I won”) that increase satisfaction, researchers have found, whereas those who come in second tend to have downward “if only” thoughts that decrease happiness.
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December 11, 2009
New study confirms what every parent’s friends suspected all along
Friends of parents have been profoundly confirmed in their almost universal feelings about their friends’ kids. A recent report shows that it’s the parents who are indulging in self-deceit:
A study published Monday in The Journal Of Child Psychology And Psychiatry has concluded that an estimated 98 percent of children under the age of 10 are remorseless sociopaths with little regard for anything other than their own egocentric interests and pleasures.
According to Dr. Leonard Mateo, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota and lead author of the study, most adults are completely unaware that they could be living among callous monsters who would remorselessly exploit them to obtain something as insignificant as an ice cream cone or a new toy.
“The most disturbing facet of this ubiquitous childhood disorder is an utter lack of empathy,” Mateo said. “These people — if you can even call them that — deliberately violate every social norm without ever pausing to consider how their selfish behavior might affect others. It’s as if they have no concept of anyone but themselves.”
[. . .]
According to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a clinical diagnostic tool, sociopaths often display superficial charm, pathological lying, manipulative behaviors, and a grandiose sense of self-importance. After observing 700 children engaged in everyday activities, Mateo and his colleagues found that 684 exhibited these behaviors at a severe or profound level.
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December 8, 2009
The downside to “ethical” shopping
There are some odd results of changing your shopping habits to be more environmentally conscious, says a recent study:
As the owner of several energy-efficient light bulbs and a recycled umbrella, I’m familiar with the critiques of “ethical consumption.” In some cases, it’s not clear that ostensibly green products are better for the environment. There’s also the risk that these lifestyle choices will make us complacent, sapping the drive to call senators and chain ourselves to coal plants. Tweaking your shopping list, the argument goes, is at best woefully insufficient and maybe even counterproductive.
But new research by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior. In their study (described in a paper now in press at Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat and steal.
[. . .]
It would be foolish to draw conclusions about the real world from just one paper and from such an artificial scenario. But the findings add to a growing body of research into a phenomenon known among social psychologists as “moral credentials” or “moral licensing.” Historically, psychologists viewed moral development as a steady progression toward more sophisticated decision-making. But an emerging school of thought stresses the capriciousness of moral responses. Several studies propose that the state of our self-image can directly influence our choices from moment to moment. When people have the chance to demonstrate their goodness, even in the most token of ways, they then feel free to relax their ethical standards.
H/T to Radley Balko for the link.
November 17, 2009
QotD: Characteristics of death-squads
This is not at all a matter of the usual stupid refusal of the FBI and other security services to understand an early warning even when they have detected one. It is a direct challenge to the unity and integrity of the armed services, which have been one of our society’s principal organs and engines of ethnic and religious integration. A U.S. soldier who wonders about the reliability of his, let alone her, Muslim colleague is not being “Islamophobic.” (A phobia is an irrational or uncontrollable fear.) If Maj. Hasan has made this understandable worry in the ranks more widespread, he has done his fanatical preacher friend the greatest possible service. But that’s his fault for doing what he did, and his superiors’ fault for letting him openly rehearse it for so long, not mine for pointing it out.
I wrote some years ago that the three most salient characteristics of the Muslim death-squad type were self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred. Surrounded as he was by fellow shrinks who were often very distressed by his menacing manner, Maj. Hasan managed to personify all three traits — with the theocratic rhetoric openly thrown in for good measure — and yet be treated even now as if the real word for him was troubled. Prepare to keep on meeting those three symptoms again, along with official attempts to oppose them only with therapy, if that. At least the holy warriors know they are committing suicide.
Christopher Hitchens, “Hard Evidence: Seven salient facts about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan”, Slate, 2009-11-16
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October 9, 2009
Consciously “green” consumers more likely to cheat, says study
The Register has an interesting summary of a recent University of Toronto study:
Psychologists in Canada have revealed new research suggesting that people who become eco-conscious “green consumers” are “more likely to steal and lie” than others.
The new study comes from professor Nina Mazar of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and her colleague Chen-Bo Zhong.
“Those lyin’, cheatin’ green consumers,” begins the statement from the university. “Buying products that claim to be made with low environmental impact can set up ‘moral credentials’ in people’s minds that give license to selfish or questionable behavior.”
[. . .]
So there you have it: People who buy green — who offset their carbon, who purchase greened-up electricity, who put windmills on their roofs etc etc — are in the main thieving, lying, holier-than-thou scumbags. The old adage is right: You can never trust a hippy.
Much as we’d love to believe it, though, the whole study — like all of its News McNugget fast-food psychobabble kind — has caused the needle on our bullshit meter to flick far across into the brown zone. Green consumers, we’d suggest, are far more likely to be ripped off by unscrupulous charlatans than they are to be charlatans themselves.
August 5, 2009
Blotting out Rorschach tests
Colby Cosh examines the furor around James Heilman’s posting of the original Rorschach inkblots to Wikipedia:
It is probably no great loss. Critics of Heilman complain that “decades” of research will have to be abandoned if the Rorschach test becomes impossible to use. But most of this research has been shown, in the last 20 years, to be flapdoodle. As soon as the test became popular — so much so that it became a staple of comedy routines about Freudian psychotherapists, along with couches and thick German accents — it had critics who pointed out that there was little or no statistically validated basis for its interpretation. After the psychiatric profession got around to trying to establish such a basis — and this happened disgracefully late in history — there was little or nothing left of what had once been perceived as the broad general usefulness of the Rorschach.
Much of the folklore that had grown up around specific elements of the test had to be thrown in the trash. It appears to have modest predictive or diagnostic power for a few very specific aspects of personality, and even this surviving foundation is shaky. Yet supporters gave, and some are still giving, the same indignant defences that pseudoscience always receives. Interpreting responses to Rorschach blots is more “art” than “science,” they have insisted. (The mating call of the quack.) Only those who are intimately familiar with the test — i. e., those who believe in it and have come to depend on it — are really qualified to judge whether it “works.”
But can the thousands of psychologists and psychiatrists who have considered the Rorschach test a useful item in the healing toolbox for generations really all have been wrong? Keep in mind that the same practitioners were eagerly recommending and performing lobotomies throughout the same period, and you have your answer.
July 15, 2009
QotD: The Matriarchy
[Alan Oak]: In a correspondence with feminist scholar Sylvia Kelso, published in Women of Other Worlds (1999), you wrote:
“Where has anyone experienced a matriarchy for test comparison?” you may ask. In fact, most of us have, as children. When the scale of our whole world was one long block long, it was a world dominated and controlled by women. Who were twice our size, drove cars, had money, could hit us if they wanted to and we couldn’t ever hit them back. Hence, at bottom, my deep, deep suspicion of feminism, matriarchy, etc. Does this mean putting my mother in charge of the world, and me demoted to a child again? No thanks, I’ll pass . . .
This leads me to another thought [. . .] Women do desperately need models for power other than the maternal. Nothing is more likely to set any subordinate’s back up, whether they be male or female, than for their boss to come the “mother knows best” routine at them. We need a third place to stand. I’m just not clear how it became my job to supply it.
Lois McMaster Bujold, interviewed by Alan Oak at WomenWriters.net, 2009-06
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