Bill Moyers recently interviewed Benjamin Barber, a renowned political theorist and a distinguished senior fellow at Demos — a public policy think tank here in New York City. Barber's most recent book is Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (2007). What's the focus of this book?…
I've been long-intrigued by Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. Philip Zimbardo turns that concept on its head in an article from Edge, "The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism." (you'll need to scroll down to the z's). Zimbardo's article appears as one of…
Back in the 1970s, when I was an undergrad student at the University of Missouri, I took a psychology course that required me to interview someone who worked in the mental health field. A nurse working at the Missouri State Mental Hospital (on Arsenal Street in the City of St.…
Intrigued by my review of numerous articles on neural plasticity, I concocted a simple experiment that had dramatic results. I set out to see whether I could cause people to have the illusion that a cheap rubber hand could “become” their own hand. Over the past few years, I’ve run this experiment on about a half-dozen people, just out of curiosity. Most of my “subjects” found that the experience was “creepy,” in that it appeared that the rubber hand “became” their own hand. It’s an do-it-yourself artificially-induced out-of-body experience.
Here’s how I ran my experiment. Step one is to buy a rubber hand, the creepy kind often used in gags.
Here’s one place where you can buy a fake hand. Alternatively, here’s a site that teaches you how to make your own rubber hand. You’ll also need to bend a coat hanger into a “Y” shape.
Finally, you’ll need a simple barrier, such as a large book. That’s all the equipment you’ll need. Here’s how you run the experiment.
Put the rubber hand side-by-side with the person’s same-side real hand.
You’ll be using the “Y” shaped coat hanger to touch precisely the same part of the rubber hand and the subject’s hand simultaneously. Move the hanger around and tap on or stroke a wide variety of corresponding parts of the two hands.
While you tap on the same portions of each hand, the subject should only be looking at the rubber hand–that’s why you’ll need some sort of barrier. …
Nor is it primarily the result of a rational choice (i.e., a systematic analysis of facts) that liberals become liberals.
We’d like to believe that we adopt our political views rationally, only after careful consideration of the “facts.” That’s a pipe dream, however. Jay Dixit’s article, “The Ideological Animal,” (published by Psychology Today) demonstrates that our political persuasion takes root well before the cerebrum kicks fully into gear. There are deep triggers that lead individuals to crave one political ideology over the other. For many of us, rational thought is post-facto justification. As David Hume famously argued,
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
Dixit’s arguments dovetail with Hume’s beliefs. As Dixit argues,
We tend to believe our political views evolve as a result of rational thought, in that we consider arguments, weigh evidence, and draw conclusions. But the truth is more complicated. Our political preferences are equally the result of factors we’re not aware of—such as how educated we are, how scary the world seems at a given moment, and personality traits that are first apparent in early childhood. Among the most potent motivators, it turns out, is fear.
What else correlates with political leaning? You won’t be surprised at some of these differences:
…conservatives and liberals boast markedly different home and office decor. Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and