Why we kill and why THEY kill

Here's what Glenn Greenwald has to say about the way we characterize the motives of Americans who kill others versus others who kill Americans:

Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivated U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales to allegedly kill 16 Afghans, including 9 children: he was drunk, he was experiencing financial stress, he was passed over for a promotion, he had a traumatic brain injury, he had marital problems, he suffered from the stresses of four tours of duty, he “saw his buddy’s leg blown off the day before the massacre,” etc. Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivates Muslims to kill Americans: they are primitive, fanatically religious, hateful Terrorists.
Although Greenwald doesn't analyze it in such terms, this is the classic ingroup-outgroup effect. For ingroup members, we make excuses. For members of outgroups, we pour on the venom. Most Americans are repulsed by the idea that we would actually try to understand the "terrorists'" actions by trying the see the world through their eyes. What is that viewpoint? Greenwald offers some ideas:
[T]hey’re responding to American violence in their country; they are traumatized and angry at the continuous deaths of Muslim children and innocent adults; they’ve calculated that striking at Americans is the only way to deter further American aggression in their part of the world.

Continue ReadingWhy we kill and why THEY kill

Voter preparation manual

I had posted on this Psyblog list before: "Why We do Dumb or Irrational Things: 10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies." I re-read it this morning. It would seem to be a good article for all people to read before voting. It's important for each of us to know how our brains work before assuming that we are voting with "free will." We often act on the basis of invisible social pressures. It's not a good idea to simply declare that we are "rational" without examining these (and many other) vulnerabilities and biases. Here are the studies summarized in the Psyblog article:

  1. The Halo Effect: When Your Own Mind is a Mystery
  2. How and Why We Lie to Ourselves: Cognitive Dissonance
  3. War, Peace and the Role of Power in Sherif's Robbers Cave Experiment
  4. Our Dark Hearts: The Stanford Prison Experiment
  5. Just Following Orders? Stanley Milgram's Obedience Experiment
  6. Why We All Stink as Intuitive Psychologists: The False Consensus Bias
  7. Why Groups and Prejudices Form So Easily: Social Identity Theory
  8. How to Avoid a Bad Bargain: Don't Threaten
  9. Why We Don't Help Others: Bystander Apathy
  10. I Can't Believe My Eyes: Conforming to the Norm

Continue ReadingVoter preparation manual

Glenn Greenwald laments liberal hypocrisy

The political left lashed out at the Administration of George W. Bush when he shredded the Constitution, but applaud in lockstep when Barack Obama does it. Glenn Greenwald comments:

Indeed: is there even a single liberal pundit, blogger or commentator who would have defended George Bush and Dick Cheney if they (rather than Obama) had been secretly targeting American citizens for execution without due process, or slaughtering children, rescuers and funeral attendees with drones, or continuing indefinite detention even a full decade after 9/11? Please. How any of these people can even look in the mirror, behold the oozing, limitless intellectual dishonesty, and not want to smash what they see is truly mystifying to me.

One of the very first non-FISA posts I ever wrote that received substantial attention was this one from January, 2006, entitled “Do Bush Followers have an Ideology”? It examined the way in which the Bush-supporting Right was more like an “authoritarian cult” rather than a political movement because its adherents had no real, fixed political beliefs; instead, I argued, their only animating “principle” was loyalty to their leader, and they would support anything he did no matter how at odds it was with their prior ostensible beliefs. That post was linked to and praised by dozens and dozens of liberal blogs: can you believe what authoritarian followers these conservatives are?, they scoffed in unison.

Continue ReadingGlenn Greenwald laments liberal hypocrisy

Iran’s nuclear bomb

At Truthout, Retired Republican House and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren indicates that he is seeing so much toxic warmongering aimed at Iran these days that it makes George W. Bush look like a pacifist:

For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; US elected officials' neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year. The rational calculus of nuclear deterrence, which had guided US policy during the cold war, and which the US government still applies to plainly despotic and bellicose nuclear states like North Korea, has gone out the window with respect to Iran. . . . Whether it is sources in Tel Aviv, sources in Washington, or both, that are feeding Iran stories to the US news media is unclear. Whoever they may be, they are playing much of the press - The Washington Post and CBS News are standout examples - like a Stradivarius. In Pentagon-speak, this is known as "prepping the psychological battlefield."

Continue ReadingIran’s nuclear bomb

Bill Moyers discusses America’s cultural divide with Jonathan Haidt

From Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers discusses our contentious culture with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Here is my summary of the excellent conversation, in which Haidt offers a roadmap for those of us weary from years of unproductive cultural clashes: Groupish tribalism is generally good because it ramps up cooperation among those in the ingroup while animosity toward outsiders is usually minimal. But tribalism evolved for purposes of "war," so that when a certain intensity is reached, "a switch is flipped, the other side is evil. They are not just our opponents. They are evil. And once you think they are evil, the ends justify the means and you can break laws and you can do anything because it is in service of fighting evil." (min 4:30). Haidt argues that though "morality" often makes us do things we think of as good, it also makes us do things we think of as bad. In the end, we are all born to be hypocrites. Our minds didn't evolve simply to allow to know the truth. In social settings, our minds are not designed to really let us know who did what to whom. "They are finely tuned navigational machines to work through a complicated social network in which you've got to maintain your alliances and reputation. And as Machiavelli told us long ago, it matters far more what people think of you than what the reality is. And we are experts at manipulating our self-presentation; we are so good at it that we believe the nonsense we say to other people."

Continue ReadingBill Moyers discusses America’s cultural divide with Jonathan Haidt