Self-dimming of awareness to protect oneself against anxiety

I'm mostly finished reading Daniel Goleman's 1985 book, Vital Lies, Simple Truths: the Psychology of Self Deception (I found a copy of the book online here). He's preaching to my choir, based on a paper I wrote in 1996 ("Decision Making, the Failure of Principles, and the Seduction of Attention), where I pointed out the critical and often unconscious role of attention in embellishing and distorting our moral decision-making. My targets were the many people who believe that morality is mostly founded on the conscious application of rules. I concluded that humans define and frame moral situations as a result of the way they attend (or don't attend) to the situations. I warned that it is important that we become aware that we have great (often subconscious) power to define the situation as moral (or not). My thesis was as follows:

Attention is constantly steering us in directions which dramatically affect the application of principles [including moral principles]. For starters, if we completely fail to attend to a subject, we will likely be ill-informed about that subject, and likely less competent to make decisions regarding such matters. At the other extreme, excessive attention can bloom into an obsession, causing one to see the entire world through glasses colored by that obsession. Attention also works in subtler ways, however, rigging the machinations of legal and moral reasoning. Attention rigs decision-making in two ways:

1) by the manner in which we attend to our perceptions of the world, and 2) in the way by which we perceive and attend to the principles themselves.

I concluded that high-level decision making is based far more on attentional strategies than on traditional problem solving skills.

Continue ReadingSelf-dimming of awareness to protect oneself against anxiety

The affect of wealth on rudeness

From and article titled "How Wealth Reduces Compassion" in Scientific American Mind: "[L]uxury car drivers were more likely to cut off other motorists instead of waiting for their turn at the intersection. This was true for both men and women upper-class drivers, regardless of the time of day or the amount of traffic at the intersection. In a different study they found that luxury car drivers were also more likely to speed past a pedestrian trying to use a crosswalk, even after making eye contact with the pedestrian." But why would it be that having a lot of money might lead people to be less compassionate to other people?

The answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings. This leads us towards being more self-focused. Another reason has to do with our attitudes towards greed. Like Gordon Gekko, upper-class people may be more likely to endorse the idea that “greed is good.”

To be fair, many wealthy people are incredibly compassionate and, in fact, many wealthy people are prime movers behind organizations that seek the level the playing field.  The big question, then, is what is going on in the minds of THOSE people that allows them to escape the corrupting influence of money?

Continue ReadingThe affect of wealth on rudeness

Synchrony and compassion

A recent experiment demonstrates that synchronous actions knit the social fabric:

The results were striking: the simple act of tapping one’s hands in synchrony with another caused our participants to report feeling more similar to their partners and to have greater compassion for their plight: it increased the number of people who helped their partner by 31 percent and increased the average time spent helping from one minute to more than seven. What these results suggest is that the compassion we feel for others is not solely a function of what befalls them: if our minds draw an association between a victim and ourselves — even a relatively trivial one — the compassion we feel for his or her suffering is amplified greatly.

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It makes you wonder whether it’s worth talking

In this New Yorker article, Ezra Klein discusses the psychology of groups (including the work of Jonathan Haidt), then points out a problem with political parties trying to think and talk:

According to the political-science literature, one of the key roles that political parties play is helping us navigate these decisions. In theory, we join parties because they share our values and our goals—values and goals that may have been passed on to us by the most important groups in our lives, such as our families and our communities—and so we trust that their policy judgments will match the ones we would come up with if we had unlimited time to study the issues. But parties, though based on a set of principles, aren’t disinterested teachers in search of truth. They’re organized groups looking to increase their power. Or, as the psychologists would put it, their reasoning may be motivated by something other than accuracy. And you can see the results among voters who pay the closest attention to the issues.
Here's another cognitive hurdle for members of political parties:
In a 2006 paper, “It Feels Like We’re Thinking,” the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels looked at a National Election Study, a poll supported by the National Science Foundation, from 1996. One of the questions asked whether “the size of the yearly budget deficit increased, decreased, or stayed about the same during Clinton’s time as President.” The correct answer is that it decreased, dramatically. Achen and Bartels categorize the respondents according to how politically informed they were. Among the least-informed respondents, Democrats and Republicans picked the wrong answer in roughly equal numbers. But among better-informed voters the story was different. Republicans who were in the fiftieth percentile gave the right answer more often than those in the ninety-fifth percentile. Bartels found a similar effect in a previous survey, in which well-informed Democrats were asked whether inflation had gone down during Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. It had, but many of those Democrats said that it hadn’t. The more information people had, it seemed, the better they were at arranging it to fit what they wanted to believe. As Bartels told me, “If I’m a Republican and an enthusiastic supporter of lower tax rates, it is uncomfortable to recognize that President Obama has reduced most Americans’ taxes—and I can find plenty of conservative information sources that deny or ignore the fact that he has.” Recently, Bartels noticed a similar polarization in attitudes toward the health-care law and the Supreme Court.
And then there is the problem that opinions without any meaningful basis (that the mandate is unconstitutional) gain legitimacy through the media/internet echo chamber:
"Once Republican politicians say this is unconstitutional, it gets repeated endlessly in the partisan media that’s friendly to the Republican Party”—Fox News, conservative talk radio, and the like—“and, because this is now the Republican Party’s position, the mainstream media needs to repeatedly explain the claims to their readers. That further moves the arguments from off the wall to on the wall, because, if you’re reading articles in the Times describing the case against the mandate, you assume this is a live controversy.” Of course, Balkin says, “if the courts didn’t buy this, it wouldn’t get anywhere.”
These are the sorts of things that pass as political thinking these days. It makes you want to ask people to leave their party affiliation at the door while discussion important issues. But how do you do that, when that affiliation has reached the level of the sacred, meaning that it is not negotiable?

Continue ReadingIt makes you wonder whether it’s worth talking

Onion: Elder offers terrible advice

The Onion "reports" on this grandfather's terrible advice. This resonated with me. How often do you hear someone claiming that, "Of course I know what I'm doing. I've been doing it for 45 years." Really? You should be deemed proficient because you've been hacking away at it for a long time? It's certainly true that a lot of people who are excellent at an activity have been doing it for a long time. This is not the same thing as claiming that one is excellent because they've been doing it for a long time. This sort of claim violates basic rules of logic. Just because this is true: "If it rains on me, I'll get wet", it does not follow that "If I'm getting wet, it is raining on me." You could be in the shower or at a swimming pool.

Continue ReadingOnion: Elder offers terrible advice