Saturday, December 03, 2005
How good of judgments and decisions do we make?
In the December 2005 issue of Discover is an article entitled "Why Do People Behave Nicely?", much of which deals with why people behave stupidly or badly. Hold onto your hat:
"In just a few years, more than 100 reality television shows have been striving to help contestants act like jerks, and audiences love it. Sure, contestants sometimes form noble alliances, and the occasional romance blossoms, but the behavior that viewers talk about the next day at the watercooler invariably involves contestants behaving maliciously or embarrassing themselves by cracking under pressure."
Americans LOVE jerks; that's why so many of those in positions of wealth, fame and power in this country qualify. We find bad behavior, and those that engage in it, to be fascinating, glamorous, and sexy, and virtuous behavior, and the poor saps who bought the childhood messages that this was the proper way to act, to be dull, boring, even foolish. Every day, you make decisions on who you want to become friends with, have sex with, hire or promote; on whose CD's you want to listen to, whose movies you want to watch, and whose face on the cover of a magazine will make you buy it... and if you're like most people, your choices overwhelmingly favor people who objectively are well into jerk territory rather than those who've shown themselves to be honest, noble, caring, etc.
Given the acceptance and approval we internalize for bad behavior all our lives, it's no surprise how easily influenced most folks are to behave in ways that they KNOW are wrong:
"Consider the most famous of all social psychology experiments, Stanley Milgram's 'Behavioral Study of Obedience,' published in 1963. After answering a newspaper ad, volunteers (all men) arrive at a Yale University laboratory, where a man in a gray lab coat asks for help in a 'learning experiment.' The subject is instructed to administer a shock to a stranger in an adjoining room when the stranger answers a question incorrectly. The shocks are mild at first, but after each wrong answer the experimenter asks the subject to deliver a stronger voltage. The cries from the stranger in the other room grow more agonized as the shock is increased in 15-volt increments. (The shocks aren't real; the 'stranger' is merely acting.) If the subject hesitates, the man in the lab coat says sternly, 'Please continue.' If the subject still balks, he is first told, 'The experiment requires that you go on,' then, 'It is absolutely essential that you continue,' and then, 'You have no other choice, you must go on.'
By the time the subjects deliver what they believe to be a 'very strong shock,' some are sweating, trembling, stuttering, or biting their lips. In the most interesting reaction, which would have made for great television, some of the subjects experience uncontrollable fits of nervous laughter. One 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman is so overcome by a seizure of laughter that the experiment has to be stopped to allow him to recover.
What drew attention to Milgram's paper was his report that most of the randomly selected men were coaxed into hitting a switch labeled 'Danger: Severe Shock,' administering a supposed 420-volt zap. Milgram was surprised that although 'subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will,' most were willing to do so."
Milgram should NOT have been surprised; *I* wouldn't have been, because I've seen countless examples of the effortlessness with which manipulators can get people to behave in the most atrocious ways, and the men in the lab coats would have had the aura of authority added on to the pitiful willingness of people to act contrary to their supposed moral standards just because someone asked them to... what's there to be surprised about?
Are you certain that YOU would have refused to administer those shocks, or at least the dangerous ones? Ask yourself this; how's your track record of refusing to do what people pressure you to do? How often have you spoken out against things you knew were wrong, compared to how many times you decided to just go with the flow, so as not to rock the boat... or not to draw the wrath of the instigators of evil against yourself?
"For more than a century, psychologists have attempted to get to the root of evil and error. What they have discovered is not encouraging. Milgram and earlier researchers demonstrated that the ability to act rationally can be subverted by crowds or by pressure from authority figures. Recent studies show that humans, even when left alone, are prone to bewildering mistakes and biases."
Unfortunate but true; I'm left with my jaw hanging open on a daily basis from seeing how often people act in flagrant disregard for facts, logic, common sense, fairness, morality and even their own best interests, and I mean intelligent, decent people, not winos in an alleyway or hardened criminals... doesn't anyone give a single moment's thought to doing what's best, what's RIGHT, or do we just blunder forward like blindfolded gorillas?
"Social psychology crystallized in the 19th century around a concern with crowd behavior: Why do otherwise reasonable individuals become irrational or even dangerous when placed in a mob of people? By the middle of the 20th century, social psychologists had widened their research to examine how people can be influenced to make incorrect judgments or cross moral boundaries. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch, a pioneer in social psychology, pitted naive test subjects against a group of strangers who made bizarre judgments about the relative lengths of lines. Pressured to conform to the group, subjects often disregarded the obvious visual evidence and adopted the prevailing judgment."
We're social animals, after all, so I suppose it makes sense that we'd tend to go along with the group, even if what they're doing or saying is ridiculous or dangerous... but it still sucks, and it gets even worse:
"About the time of Milgram's experiment, Princeton University professor John Darley studied why bystanders, when confronted with strangers in distress, sometimes respond by walking away or closing the drapes. Inspired by the case of Kitty Genovese, a New York City murder victim whose cries for help failed to rouse her neighbors to action, Darley showed that test subjects were less likely to aid a stranger if they thought they were just one among several witnesses."
How utterly despicable. It think it also helps explain why people don't intervene when someone is being attacked verbally, online as well as in real life... but I'm not sure I even WANT to know WHY the existence of multiple witnesses would lead to people acting in such an indefensible way.
"Despite evidence of sheeplike behavior, many researchers still assumed that individuals, on their own, could be counted on to be rational and moral. The sea change came in the 1970s, from insights gleaned through economics research. In a series of articles and books, psychologists Daniel Kahneman, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Amos Tversky rejected the long-held notion that humans are rational actors in a marketplace. Rather than using all the information available and calculating the best decision, they argued, the human mind relies on 'quick and dirty' heuristics, mental shortcuts or rules of thumb, to make decisions."
Not MY human mind, thanks very much; perhaps because I came from an abusive family of origin, and was a pariah at school as well, I had to learn to calculate all the possible effects of every action I might take in order to avoid as much trouble as possible... but then again, I know others from similar backgrounds who don't seem able to make even the simplest determinations of what will lead to the most desirable outcomes, or avoid the worst ones (a grim example was a woman whose ex-husband would beat her if he came home and found that the litter box hadn't been cleaned, who was nevertheless consistently unable to make the choice to clean the litter box before he got home), so maybe it's just what's natural for me to do given my personality. Either way, this is clearly one of those ways I differ wildly from normal folks, psychologically speaking, and explains some of the frustration I experience from bright, educated people seeming unable to look at all the facts and apply logic to them to make decisions.
"people use arbitrary categories to make judgments. On hot August days, for instance, people look forward to the first day in September, as if turning a page on the calendar would suddenly make the weather cooler... people make two errors in this case: They underestimate temperature changes within a month (assuming, for instance, that August will be uniformly hot) and overestimate the changes in temperature that will occur when the month ends.
... We humans have a variety of ways of perceiving ourselves as smarter, more skilled, and more appealing than we are in reality. Most drivers, for example, say they drive more safely than the average person, even though that is a statistical impossibility. People also tend to consider themselves more attractive than others say they are. We tend to underestimate the chance that past events will reoccur, like winning two poker hands in a row (the 'hot hand' fallacy). Likewise, we incorrectly assume that because a basketball player has made the last five shots he will make the sixth. We overestimate small risks, like being killed by a terrorist, yet underestimate much larger ones, like being killed in a traffic accident.
The list goes on: the 'hindsight bias,' the 'systematic distortion effect,' the 'false uniqueness effect,' the 'just world bias,' the 'clouded judgment effect,' and the 'external agency illusion.' And just in case you think you're hip to your own biases, researchers have unveiled the 'bias blind spot,' in which you see biases in others but overlook them in yourself."
In other words, the average person doesn't judge ANYTHING accurately; no wonder so many bad decisions, and thus so many mistakes, get made.
"Human thinking... is of two broad types. There are the snap judgments we make on the fly, like assessing whether a person approaching us on the street is welcoming or threatening. And there are the activities to which we apply the full force of our minds, like preparing a business presentation or solving a math problem. That laborious reasoning has long been assumed to represent the gold standard of human thinking. It is the type of reasoning that social psychologists themselves employ. Test subjects, however, are typically placed in a situation and required to guess, react, or estimate. Later, the researcher analyzes the behavior at length, through the lens of statistics or logic. Whenever there is a disparity, the test subject is assumed to be displaying the error or bias, not the researcher."
Verrrrrrrrrrrrry interesting... but WHY don't people use "laborious reasoning" "on the fly"? It doesn't actually take more than a moment to do for most situations one encounters in daily life, or even for most surprise situations; *I* automatically run multiple scenarios and analyses thereof in my head for everything, because I could be, and was, questioned at length about every move I made as a kid and young adult, and so had to be able to justify how all my choices were based on accurate analyses of all the available facts... yeah, that's not a pleasant thought, but the point is that it's doable in a couple of seconds even for a kid, and it leads to better results, so WHY don't people do it?
Another typical lapse in judgment is how people automatically assume that their preferences, beliefs, etc, reflect those of the majority, which is why those who find themselves in opposition to the results of studies will often proclaim them to be "wrong"... in contrast, you'll notice, to how *I* say that something a study shows is common doesn't apply to ME but NEVER deny the correctness of the findings. This sort of lapse has actually been studied:
"In a now famous study, Lee Ross and colleagues at Stanford University asked students if they would walk around campus wearing a sandwich board that read 'Eat at Joe's.' The test subjects who agreed to do this embarrassing task predicted that 62 percent of others approached to carry the sign would do it. But test subjects who refused to carry the sign thought that only 33 percent of others would agree to do it when asked. Researchers concluded that they had found a new bias in reasoning, which they called the 'false consensus effect'-that people have the naive tendency to project their individual attitudes, values, and behaviors onto the majority."
What's really interesting, though, is a different way of looking at it:
"By definition, most people are in the majority most of the time... Therefore, if you assume that your opinion will match that of the majority, you will be right more often than not."
That would explain why people might reasonably keep believing that others will think and feel as they do in many situations; it should NOT prevent them from grasping that they're not ALWAYS in the majority, though, or from asking themselves how likely they are to be in the majority in individual cases, but I suppose that's too much to ask.
"People don't decide on a strategy and then assume people will act similarly. Rather, they assume similarity and then act on that assumption... this may explain why we do many socially conscious acts, such as taking time to vote even though we know that our individual vote probably won't make a difference. The assumption that people will act like us actually influences our decision to participate.
The result is that there are higher levels of cooperation in groups where people project their beliefs on others."
All well and good, but most of what we do doesn't involve group cooperation, so I maintain that we still need to take a reality break before making judgments.
The last bit of the article that I found attention-grabbing was this:
"developmental psychologist Michael Maratsos of the University of Minnesota argues that the truly troubling revelation of Milgram's experiment was the extent of conformity and cruelty, 'given how little the subjects had at stake.'"
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; these so-called experts need to start doing thorough studies of online interactions, which show human nature at its least restrained, because if they did they'd know that people will leap to conform with ugly behavior with NOTHING at stake... and if you don't think that the ringleaders of these online attacks would be perfectly willing to push people to do something physically painful to the victims if a way to do so were available, or that any of the co-attackers would hesitate to go along with it, you've never seen a REAL forum fight.
The absolute bottom line here is that you have the ability to think, and it's up to you to make a conscious effort to use it. It's not difficult to figure out what the right thing to do is, or whether a person whose life impinges on yours is good or bad, and to act appropriately; you just need to CHOOSE to do the figuring out and the acting. For less effort than you probably expend trying to decide what to watch on TV each night, you can wildly improve your judgments and decisions, not to mention your karma (by supporting good people and opposing the bad ones); isn't it worth a try?
"In just a few years, more than 100 reality television shows have been striving to help contestants act like jerks, and audiences love it. Sure, contestants sometimes form noble alliances, and the occasional romance blossoms, but the behavior that viewers talk about the next day at the watercooler invariably involves contestants behaving maliciously or embarrassing themselves by cracking under pressure."
Americans LOVE jerks; that's why so many of those in positions of wealth, fame and power in this country qualify. We find bad behavior, and those that engage in it, to be fascinating, glamorous, and sexy, and virtuous behavior, and the poor saps who bought the childhood messages that this was the proper way to act, to be dull, boring, even foolish. Every day, you make decisions on who you want to become friends with, have sex with, hire or promote; on whose CD's you want to listen to, whose movies you want to watch, and whose face on the cover of a magazine will make you buy it... and if you're like most people, your choices overwhelmingly favor people who objectively are well into jerk territory rather than those who've shown themselves to be honest, noble, caring, etc.
Given the acceptance and approval we internalize for bad behavior all our lives, it's no surprise how easily influenced most folks are to behave in ways that they KNOW are wrong:
"Consider the most famous of all social psychology experiments, Stanley Milgram's 'Behavioral Study of Obedience,' published in 1963. After answering a newspaper ad, volunteers (all men) arrive at a Yale University laboratory, where a man in a gray lab coat asks for help in a 'learning experiment.' The subject is instructed to administer a shock to a stranger in an adjoining room when the stranger answers a question incorrectly. The shocks are mild at first, but after each wrong answer the experimenter asks the subject to deliver a stronger voltage. The cries from the stranger in the other room grow more agonized as the shock is increased in 15-volt increments. (The shocks aren't real; the 'stranger' is merely acting.) If the subject hesitates, the man in the lab coat says sternly, 'Please continue.' If the subject still balks, he is first told, 'The experiment requires that you go on,' then, 'It is absolutely essential that you continue,' and then, 'You have no other choice, you must go on.'
By the time the subjects deliver what they believe to be a 'very strong shock,' some are sweating, trembling, stuttering, or biting their lips. In the most interesting reaction, which would have made for great television, some of the subjects experience uncontrollable fits of nervous laughter. One 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman is so overcome by a seizure of laughter that the experiment has to be stopped to allow him to recover.
What drew attention to Milgram's paper was his report that most of the randomly selected men were coaxed into hitting a switch labeled 'Danger: Severe Shock,' administering a supposed 420-volt zap. Milgram was surprised that although 'subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will,' most were willing to do so."
Milgram should NOT have been surprised; *I* wouldn't have been, because I've seen countless examples of the effortlessness with which manipulators can get people to behave in the most atrocious ways, and the men in the lab coats would have had the aura of authority added on to the pitiful willingness of people to act contrary to their supposed moral standards just because someone asked them to... what's there to be surprised about?
Are you certain that YOU would have refused to administer those shocks, or at least the dangerous ones? Ask yourself this; how's your track record of refusing to do what people pressure you to do? How often have you spoken out against things you knew were wrong, compared to how many times you decided to just go with the flow, so as not to rock the boat... or not to draw the wrath of the instigators of evil against yourself?
"For more than a century, psychologists have attempted to get to the root of evil and error. What they have discovered is not encouraging. Milgram and earlier researchers demonstrated that the ability to act rationally can be subverted by crowds or by pressure from authority figures. Recent studies show that humans, even when left alone, are prone to bewildering mistakes and biases."
Unfortunate but true; I'm left with my jaw hanging open on a daily basis from seeing how often people act in flagrant disregard for facts, logic, common sense, fairness, morality and even their own best interests, and I mean intelligent, decent people, not winos in an alleyway or hardened criminals... doesn't anyone give a single moment's thought to doing what's best, what's RIGHT, or do we just blunder forward like blindfolded gorillas?
"Social psychology crystallized in the 19th century around a concern with crowd behavior: Why do otherwise reasonable individuals become irrational or even dangerous when placed in a mob of people? By the middle of the 20th century, social psychologists had widened their research to examine how people can be influenced to make incorrect judgments or cross moral boundaries. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch, a pioneer in social psychology, pitted naive test subjects against a group of strangers who made bizarre judgments about the relative lengths of lines. Pressured to conform to the group, subjects often disregarded the obvious visual evidence and adopted the prevailing judgment."
We're social animals, after all, so I suppose it makes sense that we'd tend to go along with the group, even if what they're doing or saying is ridiculous or dangerous... but it still sucks, and it gets even worse:
"About the time of Milgram's experiment, Princeton University professor John Darley studied why bystanders, when confronted with strangers in distress, sometimes respond by walking away or closing the drapes. Inspired by the case of Kitty Genovese, a New York City murder victim whose cries for help failed to rouse her neighbors to action, Darley showed that test subjects were less likely to aid a stranger if they thought they were just one among several witnesses."
How utterly despicable. It think it also helps explain why people don't intervene when someone is being attacked verbally, online as well as in real life... but I'm not sure I even WANT to know WHY the existence of multiple witnesses would lead to people acting in such an indefensible way.
"Despite evidence of sheeplike behavior, many researchers still assumed that individuals, on their own, could be counted on to be rational and moral. The sea change came in the 1970s, from insights gleaned through economics research. In a series of articles and books, psychologists Daniel Kahneman, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Amos Tversky rejected the long-held notion that humans are rational actors in a marketplace. Rather than using all the information available and calculating the best decision, they argued, the human mind relies on 'quick and dirty' heuristics, mental shortcuts or rules of thumb, to make decisions."
Not MY human mind, thanks very much; perhaps because I came from an abusive family of origin, and was a pariah at school as well, I had to learn to calculate all the possible effects of every action I might take in order to avoid as much trouble as possible... but then again, I know others from similar backgrounds who don't seem able to make even the simplest determinations of what will lead to the most desirable outcomes, or avoid the worst ones (a grim example was a woman whose ex-husband would beat her if he came home and found that the litter box hadn't been cleaned, who was nevertheless consistently unable to make the choice to clean the litter box before he got home), so maybe it's just what's natural for me to do given my personality. Either way, this is clearly one of those ways I differ wildly from normal folks, psychologically speaking, and explains some of the frustration I experience from bright, educated people seeming unable to look at all the facts and apply logic to them to make decisions.
"people use arbitrary categories to make judgments. On hot August days, for instance, people look forward to the first day in September, as if turning a page on the calendar would suddenly make the weather cooler... people make two errors in this case: They underestimate temperature changes within a month (assuming, for instance, that August will be uniformly hot) and overestimate the changes in temperature that will occur when the month ends.
... We humans have a variety of ways of perceiving ourselves as smarter, more skilled, and more appealing than we are in reality. Most drivers, for example, say they drive more safely than the average person, even though that is a statistical impossibility. People also tend to consider themselves more attractive than others say they are. We tend to underestimate the chance that past events will reoccur, like winning two poker hands in a row (the 'hot hand' fallacy). Likewise, we incorrectly assume that because a basketball player has made the last five shots he will make the sixth. We overestimate small risks, like being killed by a terrorist, yet underestimate much larger ones, like being killed in a traffic accident.
The list goes on: the 'hindsight bias,' the 'systematic distortion effect,' the 'false uniqueness effect,' the 'just world bias,' the 'clouded judgment effect,' and the 'external agency illusion.' And just in case you think you're hip to your own biases, researchers have unveiled the 'bias blind spot,' in which you see biases in others but overlook them in yourself."
In other words, the average person doesn't judge ANYTHING accurately; no wonder so many bad decisions, and thus so many mistakes, get made.
"Human thinking... is of two broad types. There are the snap judgments we make on the fly, like assessing whether a person approaching us on the street is welcoming or threatening. And there are the activities to which we apply the full force of our minds, like preparing a business presentation or solving a math problem. That laborious reasoning has long been assumed to represent the gold standard of human thinking. It is the type of reasoning that social psychologists themselves employ. Test subjects, however, are typically placed in a situation and required to guess, react, or estimate. Later, the researcher analyzes the behavior at length, through the lens of statistics or logic. Whenever there is a disparity, the test subject is assumed to be displaying the error or bias, not the researcher."
Verrrrrrrrrrrrry interesting... but WHY don't people use "laborious reasoning" "on the fly"? It doesn't actually take more than a moment to do for most situations one encounters in daily life, or even for most surprise situations; *I* automatically run multiple scenarios and analyses thereof in my head for everything, because I could be, and was, questioned at length about every move I made as a kid and young adult, and so had to be able to justify how all my choices were based on accurate analyses of all the available facts... yeah, that's not a pleasant thought, but the point is that it's doable in a couple of seconds even for a kid, and it leads to better results, so WHY don't people do it?
Another typical lapse in judgment is how people automatically assume that their preferences, beliefs, etc, reflect those of the majority, which is why those who find themselves in opposition to the results of studies will often proclaim them to be "wrong"... in contrast, you'll notice, to how *I* say that something a study shows is common doesn't apply to ME but NEVER deny the correctness of the findings. This sort of lapse has actually been studied:
"In a now famous study, Lee Ross and colleagues at Stanford University asked students if they would walk around campus wearing a sandwich board that read 'Eat at Joe's.' The test subjects who agreed to do this embarrassing task predicted that 62 percent of others approached to carry the sign would do it. But test subjects who refused to carry the sign thought that only 33 percent of others would agree to do it when asked. Researchers concluded that they had found a new bias in reasoning, which they called the 'false consensus effect'-that people have the naive tendency to project their individual attitudes, values, and behaviors onto the majority."
What's really interesting, though, is a different way of looking at it:
"By definition, most people are in the majority most of the time... Therefore, if you assume that your opinion will match that of the majority, you will be right more often than not."
That would explain why people might reasonably keep believing that others will think and feel as they do in many situations; it should NOT prevent them from grasping that they're not ALWAYS in the majority, though, or from asking themselves how likely they are to be in the majority in individual cases, but I suppose that's too much to ask.
"People don't decide on a strategy and then assume people will act similarly. Rather, they assume similarity and then act on that assumption... this may explain why we do many socially conscious acts, such as taking time to vote even though we know that our individual vote probably won't make a difference. The assumption that people will act like us actually influences our decision to participate.
The result is that there are higher levels of cooperation in groups where people project their beliefs on others."
All well and good, but most of what we do doesn't involve group cooperation, so I maintain that we still need to take a reality break before making judgments.
The last bit of the article that I found attention-grabbing was this:
"developmental psychologist Michael Maratsos of the University of Minnesota argues that the truly troubling revelation of Milgram's experiment was the extent of conformity and cruelty, 'given how little the subjects had at stake.'"
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; these so-called experts need to start doing thorough studies of online interactions, which show human nature at its least restrained, because if they did they'd know that people will leap to conform with ugly behavior with NOTHING at stake... and if you don't think that the ringleaders of these online attacks would be perfectly willing to push people to do something physically painful to the victims if a way to do so were available, or that any of the co-attackers would hesitate to go along with it, you've never seen a REAL forum fight.
The absolute bottom line here is that you have the ability to think, and it's up to you to make a conscious effort to use it. It's not difficult to figure out what the right thing to do is, or whether a person whose life impinges on yours is good or bad, and to act appropriately; you just need to CHOOSE to do the figuring out and the acting. For less effort than you probably expend trying to decide what to watch on TV each night, you can wildly improve your judgments and decisions, not to mention your karma (by supporting good people and opposing the bad ones); isn't it worth a try?
Friday, December 02, 2005
Odds and ends #2
I've made a strange and disturbing discovery; if I eat beyond a certain amount of candy, I get nauseous. It's not that I think that either my weight or my health would benefit from unlimited candy consumption, it's just that this year I've also started getting tummy disturbance from fruit and vegetables, and I've developed an increasing inability to eat beyond a certain amount of protein or fatty foods without "cutting" it with bland carbs such as plain rice or potato chips (yeah, I know, but when you start feeling internal distress, if you're smart you'll quickly eat whatever will settle it down) ... it scares me a little, because if "dry salties" and such stop paving the way for other foods to be comfortably eaten, what will I eat THEN?
I saw a show on the Discovery Science Channel called "More Clever Critters" that demonstrated the astonishing problem-solving ability of keas, which are parrots that live in New Zealand; the REALLY mind-boggling thing was that they did the mirror test on the birds, to see if they're self-aware (in other words, if they recognize that their reflections are them, rather than believing them to be other birds)... and they ARE!! It was a big, BIG deal when they 1st realized that chimps are self-aware, because they'd arrogantly assumed that only humans were, and still a big deal when they found self-awareness in other primates, but a BIRD?!! One of the keas actually went so far as to strike various poses while looking back and forth between the body part it was moving and its reflection... and then they showed footage of a chimp doing the same sort of thing, which drove home the point of what level of mental functioning these birds are at. The one part of the test that was missing is where they mark the animals with paint where they can't see it (they're handled in a way that doesn't alert them to the paint being applied), to verify that when they look in the mirror they notice the spots; the keas, being wild birds, obviously couldn't be tested that way, but they really need to try it with some tame ones to be absolutely sure that they're understanding the meaning of their reflections, and aren't just showing some other sort of behavior that mimics recognition.
If you see a connection between being self-aware and having a soul, as I always have, this news about keas proves that at least some birds have them; imagine how lovely a hummingbird's soul would be, if it has one. I read recently that dolphins pass the mirror test too; their legendary willingness to rescue drowning humans had already made me pretty certain that they had souls, and this just backs it up. Self-awareness in animals seems directly linked to intelligence... and that, to me, is further evidence of the soul being made of the energy of thought.
And finally, I've realized something about my collections; my little figurines, stuffies and toys provide me with physical things to be attached to, and thus help anchor me in the physical world... without them, I'd be adrift in a sea of ideas, thoughts, reading, writing, cyberspace, analysis, and spiritual contemplation, punctuated only periodically by my more, um, meaningful interactions with my husband, and those rare times with friends when we do something more than exchange ideas or maybe watch a movie. Most days, if I could operate a computer directly with my gray matter, and science articles and such could be piped directly into it, I could live as a disembodied brain in a jar and not see much difference... except that looking around at my things makes me happy, both because of their attractiveness and because for most of my life I didn't have much of anything, so I'd be much LESS happy without them. I could withdraw to an austere life of poverty in a spiritual retreat on an isolated mountaintop and probably be pretty satisfied with an existence in bare stone rooms, as long as they had digital cable and a decent DSL connection... except that I'd be miserable without my shelves full of collectibles smiling down on me every day. Perhaps that makes my collections a barrier to my ultimate levels of intellect and spirituality; so be it.
If you were wondering where I envisioned my husband would be if I was living in a retreat... he'd be living there too, because he's even more of a natural hermit than I am, and even less attached to the physical world (he doesn't have collections). His requirements for computer equipment are more extreme than mine, and he'd have to be allowed to be helicoptered out occasionally to see some of the noxious no-talent bands he likes perform, which is cheating a little, but overall he'd be happy to just be a lump in front of a screen, and wouldn't mind having to discuss spiritual issues if it meant he didn't have to work or maintain a household anymore. Actually, he had one other requirement, that none of the other retreat-dwellers be less skilled on the computer than he is, so that he wouldn't be stuck giving tech support to anyone but me; he says that his idea of hell is 500 people who don't know how to use their computers, all expecting his assistance.
Anyways; if anyone ever tries to question the wisdom of my having such huge collections, I'll have a pretty slick reply... other than my standard 2-word one, that is.
I saw a show on the Discovery Science Channel called "More Clever Critters" that demonstrated the astonishing problem-solving ability of keas, which are parrots that live in New Zealand; the REALLY mind-boggling thing was that they did the mirror test on the birds, to see if they're self-aware (in other words, if they recognize that their reflections are them, rather than believing them to be other birds)... and they ARE!! It was a big, BIG deal when they 1st realized that chimps are self-aware, because they'd arrogantly assumed that only humans were, and still a big deal when they found self-awareness in other primates, but a BIRD?!! One of the keas actually went so far as to strike various poses while looking back and forth between the body part it was moving and its reflection... and then they showed footage of a chimp doing the same sort of thing, which drove home the point of what level of mental functioning these birds are at. The one part of the test that was missing is where they mark the animals with paint where they can't see it (they're handled in a way that doesn't alert them to the paint being applied), to verify that when they look in the mirror they notice the spots; the keas, being wild birds, obviously couldn't be tested that way, but they really need to try it with some tame ones to be absolutely sure that they're understanding the meaning of their reflections, and aren't just showing some other sort of behavior that mimics recognition.
If you see a connection between being self-aware and having a soul, as I always have, this news about keas proves that at least some birds have them; imagine how lovely a hummingbird's soul would be, if it has one. I read recently that dolphins pass the mirror test too; their legendary willingness to rescue drowning humans had already made me pretty certain that they had souls, and this just backs it up. Self-awareness in animals seems directly linked to intelligence... and that, to me, is further evidence of the soul being made of the energy of thought.
And finally, I've realized something about my collections; my little figurines, stuffies and toys provide me with physical things to be attached to, and thus help anchor me in the physical world... without them, I'd be adrift in a sea of ideas, thoughts, reading, writing, cyberspace, analysis, and spiritual contemplation, punctuated only periodically by my more, um, meaningful interactions with my husband, and those rare times with friends when we do something more than exchange ideas or maybe watch a movie. Most days, if I could operate a computer directly with my gray matter, and science articles and such could be piped directly into it, I could live as a disembodied brain in a jar and not see much difference... except that looking around at my things makes me happy, both because of their attractiveness and because for most of my life I didn't have much of anything, so I'd be much LESS happy without them. I could withdraw to an austere life of poverty in a spiritual retreat on an isolated mountaintop and probably be pretty satisfied with an existence in bare stone rooms, as long as they had digital cable and a decent DSL connection... except that I'd be miserable without my shelves full of collectibles smiling down on me every day. Perhaps that makes my collections a barrier to my ultimate levels of intellect and spirituality; so be it.
If you were wondering where I envisioned my husband would be if I was living in a retreat... he'd be living there too, because he's even more of a natural hermit than I am, and even less attached to the physical world (he doesn't have collections). His requirements for computer equipment are more extreme than mine, and he'd have to be allowed to be helicoptered out occasionally to see some of the noxious no-talent bands he likes perform, which is cheating a little, but overall he'd be happy to just be a lump in front of a screen, and wouldn't mind having to discuss spiritual issues if it meant he didn't have to work or maintain a household anymore. Actually, he had one other requirement, that none of the other retreat-dwellers be less skilled on the computer than he is, so that he wouldn't be stuck giving tech support to anyone but me; he says that his idea of hell is 500 people who don't know how to use their computers, all expecting his assistance.
Anyways; if anyone ever tries to question the wisdom of my having such huge collections, I'll have a pretty slick reply... other than my standard 2-word one, that is.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Odds and ends
I looked out at the patio tonight, and saw what I thought was our possum boy... and something was wrong with his ear!! I called anxiously to him to get him to look at me so I could see if he was injured... and I saw that this was a different possum, our THIRD. He's somewhat smaller than our male, with lighter fur and what appears to be an oddly pigmented ear; he was a little nervous, but bolder than either of the other 2 had been when they 1st came. He was a perfectly nice looking possum... and I should have chased him away, because when he and the other male encounter each other, they'll fight, and the little female would probably run away, or be chased and possibly attacked. The thing is, possum faces are so sweet in their goofy way, and he was obviously starving, and... and I just couldn't do that to an animal whose only crime was to be hungry enough to come into an area that must reek of the other, bigger male to grab some food.
Possums are solitary animals, aside from brief necessary encounters during mating season; our original 2 are already acting totally outside of their normal parameters by hanging out together, but does that mean that another MALE can hang out here too? I tend to doubt it, especially after the incident I posted about on 11-13-05, when my possum boy was barking protractedly at another possum that was on the other side of the fence, and trying to climb over and get to him... but all I can do is cross my fingers and see what happens next.
I discovered something cool today, a site called Freecycle
http://www.freecycle.org/
from which you can find associated groups in your area, not just in America but many other countries as well, where you can offer up stuff you want to get rid of, and then decide who among those in the group that want it can come and pick it up, be the recipient of things that other members are giving away, and even post requests to be given things... all FREE. The idea is to extend the reuse/recycle idea to stuff that accumulates in the backs of closets, or gets piled on the curb on trash day, especially the latter (because what gets thrown away often ends up in landfills), and to be able to help people out. I'm big on donating unused items to charity, but not every charity takes every kind of thing, and most of them won't send a truck to pick up bigger things (which is why so much furniture just gets thrown out, because no one wants to rent a truck to take a near-worthless table or whatever to Goodwill), and it's a cool idea to be part of a community that allows everyone to give directly to those who have themselves given to others, so... check them out.
My husband and I had an amusing, if gross (no surprise there), marital moment today; we were doing some silly thing with our fingertips touching, and then, because he's the king of flatulence, I pushed his finger, pointing out that that was the opposite of PULLING his finger (that disgusting American game that's supposed to make the person fart)... and he BELCHED, telling me that pushing the finger instead of pulling it caused the fart to back up and come out the other end. I didn't know whether to shriek, laugh, or smack him, so I did all 3. He was very proud of himself, especially that he'd been able to belch at will, which I don't remember him having done before; he then tried to teach ME to do it, but no matter how much air I swallowed, or what sort of throat contortions I did, nothing happened, thank goodness... I'd be dismayed if my body were capable of any such crude noise-making.
Never a dull moment, lol.
Possums are solitary animals, aside from brief necessary encounters during mating season; our original 2 are already acting totally outside of their normal parameters by hanging out together, but does that mean that another MALE can hang out here too? I tend to doubt it, especially after the incident I posted about on 11-13-05, when my possum boy was barking protractedly at another possum that was on the other side of the fence, and trying to climb over and get to him... but all I can do is cross my fingers and see what happens next.
I discovered something cool today, a site called Freecycle
http://www.freecycle.org/
from which you can find associated groups in your area, not just in America but many other countries as well, where you can offer up stuff you want to get rid of, and then decide who among those in the group that want it can come and pick it up, be the recipient of things that other members are giving away, and even post requests to be given things... all FREE. The idea is to extend the reuse/recycle idea to stuff that accumulates in the backs of closets, or gets piled on the curb on trash day, especially the latter (because what gets thrown away often ends up in landfills), and to be able to help people out. I'm big on donating unused items to charity, but not every charity takes every kind of thing, and most of them won't send a truck to pick up bigger things (which is why so much furniture just gets thrown out, because no one wants to rent a truck to take a near-worthless table or whatever to Goodwill), and it's a cool idea to be part of a community that allows everyone to give directly to those who have themselves given to others, so... check them out.
My husband and I had an amusing, if gross (no surprise there), marital moment today; we were doing some silly thing with our fingertips touching, and then, because he's the king of flatulence, I pushed his finger, pointing out that that was the opposite of PULLING his finger (that disgusting American game that's supposed to make the person fart)... and he BELCHED, telling me that pushing the finger instead of pulling it caused the fart to back up and come out the other end. I didn't know whether to shriek, laugh, or smack him, so I did all 3. He was very proud of himself, especially that he'd been able to belch at will, which I don't remember him having done before; he then tried to teach ME to do it, but no matter how much air I swallowed, or what sort of throat contortions I did, nothing happened, thank goodness... I'd be dismayed if my body were capable of any such crude noise-making.
Never a dull moment, lol.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Learning about the manipulation process
Don't you wonder how manipulators manage to enter the lives of intelligent, educated, decent people, and somehow make them act like lunatics? This is one of the things I want to figure out the most, because I've never been able to construct in my mind a logical scenario by which a manipulator could get their puppet to do their evil bidding; it's not like they can just ASK
Manipulator: Why don't you stop being Sally's friend, and start treating her like dirt from now on?
Puppet: Sure, I'd be happy to repay Sally's love and trust with abuse.
so how DOES Sally end up having a friend turn into an enemy overnight for what looks to her like no reason? What are the magic words that are used to persuade the puppet, and what's the psychology behind it?
One of the truisms of human nature is that manipulators feel that they MUST be the central figure in whatever social group they're in, and if someone new shows up who does NOT show them deference, and, worse, who members of the group openly admire, war is declared, and the end result will virtually always be that the manipulator will turn the entire group against the interloper... because not one person in a million ever realizes that the manipulation is going on, or thinks the situation through to deduce who the bad guy REALLY is, or speaks up to or about the manipulator.
There was a time in my early days online when I was friends with 2 women who became friends with each other... and then out of the blue one day, one of those women attacked me like a rabid dog, and the other woman, although she pretended for a while that she was being neutral and staying my friend, had become her henchman (henchperson?). It ended badly, of course, and I assumed at the time that that was it... but several years later, the "henchman" contacted me begging for forgiveness, admitting to having been totally in the wrong, and that I was totally right about the manipulator, who had eventually turned on her as I'd predicted she would. We've been in touch periodically since then, but it just recently occurred to me that she represents a golden opportunity for me to find out how a "start treating your friend as an enemy" manipulation is handled; I sent her a lengthy email asking detailed questions about every aspect of how the ugly events between us were orchestrated by the manipulator, and she has sent me several emails with replies, with more to come because she's got lots more to explain... or, rather, I HOPE there'll be lots more, but realistically she may get tired of it before she's finished, which I'm prepared for. I'm going to share some of what she's sent me so far, even though it's mostly about what she thought and felt rather than what was said to her to persuade her; it's interesting stuff, and valuable in its own right. I'll call my friend turned enemy turned friend Jane, and the manipulator Anne. I've chosen to quote Jane directly, even though she rambles, so that you can get the information in her own words rather than via a summary and analysis by me, and see her struggle to make sense of what she now views as crazy behavior... and also see how some aspects of her story change as time goes on (the quotes are in chronological order), as she becomes more willing to admit that she KNEW she was being led astray and didn't fight it. I'm not even going to do my usual commentary between quotes, because nothing I could ever come up with would be as powerful as this:
"When I first started talking to Anne on-line, I was in a particularly vulnerable time and I suppose I was wanting something, a good friend, a confidant, someone to love me, I think all of the above. She mentored me too on things on the internet, things I really didn't know about, like how to download IM's like Yahoo and MSN and ICQ. She taught me how to use them and such as that. She spent a lot of time with me on line and I mean a LOT of time. She seemed to totally understand me and she was very, well, it was flattering and answered a deep need within me, I suppose. She was pretty good at drawing someone out and I suppose, it is part of her personality to do that, give a lot of attention to someone new, cultivate them, I suppose, until some how, some way, they were enamoured of her to the point that, I do not really know if I have the words, but it seems that by different things, perhaps confiding weaknesses and little secrets or intimacies of thoughts, I felt as if we were connected totally. I do remember noticing on more than one occasion that she had a great need to be the one in control and that she did not very well tolerate anyone whose opinion differed from hers, but, I think in the glow of our 'closeness', I felt it was something time and perserverance would change, amazing how we always feel that we can change them, take away their bad experiences, etc., be the true friend they have always needed and wanted, take away their fears, etc. As far as what she said to me to turn me against you and what I thought, I had seen your posts after you and she started fighting, or parts of them one time before she deleted them, and though I felt you might have had some truth to what you were saying, and it was your opinion, after all, she told me of other incidents where you had supposedly insulted her, etc., and that made you appear in the wrong although I truly knew better. I do not know everything, but I felt it was a very unfortunate thing and it could have, should have been discussed more, but I was afraid of forwarding that opinion too much as what effort I did make to say something along that lines caused a rather violent response from her, and, frankly, I was afraid she would delete me too, I am ashamed to say, I was afraid of that same thing."
"I can tell you one thing I have learned, more than anything else, through not only my experiences with Anne but also with other people since then. No one manipulates anyone to do something but what they allow them to manipulate them to do. As for all the why's and wherefore's, I am not sure I can answer for anyone other than myself, but I think in my case there was this strong need to be needed, to be wanted, to be accepted, to be loved, whatever, and an equally strong feeling that I did not deserve any of those things. I think that the 'manipulators' of the world recognize those weaknesses in others and hone in on them as a lionness hones in on the weakest member of a herd. Maybe there is a 'scent', lol, seriously, though since some of this was accomplished only on-line, there must be a way that that yearning and weakness is communicated through words alone, or something in the attitude, but I am as sure of that as I am that I am now stronger and not so 'needy', or at least I truly hope so, perhaps it is just that I no longer need to be needy as I am as needed as I need to be by the circumstances of life. Still, there is that weakness that is sensed by the predators out there and they are able to capitalize on it. Perhaps they know that what we fear the most is being abandoned by the one on whom we have placed our obsessesion. It also seems that those of us with this problem unconsciously or subconsciously choose someone whom we believe is wounded, hurt badly by others and we can be the hero, you know, we can save them, we can turn them to love anew, we can make them see the beauty and the reward of true love."
"I think, looking back that I knew that what she was saying wasn't right in some area or the other, but I simply chose not to act on those instincts. I have come to the conclusion that we all have to own our mistakes and I own those mistakes I made, but there are no excuses, there can only be truth, and truthfully, I chose to willfully ignore the warning signs I saw myself, the callous disregard for others, the need to be #1 with everyone, and I surely was able to convince myself, somehow, that in the long run I could maintain a friendship with you and still keep my relationship with Anne. Looking back, I know I compromised my own instincts there because truly I felt that whatever had started the argument, and again, I promise you that I did not read all the postings as I believe I had read only one part of it when she ended up deleting everything, what she showed me, I believe, was nothing, I simply relied on everything she told me as 100% truth, despite my feelings that there was more to it than I was hearing, I simply decided not to listen to my own feelings, once again, I believe that it was not so much that she told me anything, but that she emoted to me that only 100% support of her would do and that anything less would result in a loss of her in my life, which I wanted to avoid at all costs."
"The only thing I can say, looking back, with more knowledge of the workings of a bipolar mindset, is that those people who have that disease are truly masters at manipulation, they exist mainly during the times their disease is extremely active, by manipulating the emotions and weaknesses of others. They seem to have almost a sixth sense for those weaknesses and emotions they can manage too, but I am sure that we 'walking wounded' transmit all too clear signs to them that they can find something to do with."
"As to why I kept in contact with you even though I became increasingly hostile to you, well, I am not sure, I could say that it is possible that I simply wanted out of the situation I had put myself into, not being able to voluntarily give up Anne and yet wanting to stay around more positive influences which meant you and your group, but you in particular. I suppose the reason I became hostile to you when we hadn't had a fight was because I was being asked, no actually demanded by Anne to be a spy, and why I do not know, nor why I reported back to her, actually I do not understand any of why I did those things too well, you know, other than having this complete fascination, obsession, with Anne."
"As to why I got hostile to you, more so over time, I could only speculate that that might have been a result of my feeling guilty. Truly, I know that I did not really believe that you were the kind of person she was trying to make me believe you were, and yet, it seemed so absolutely necessary that you be that person, and the amount of pressure put on me to see what was being said and done her way, and try to act as a spy, well, that was a pressure, for sure. Perhaps it was a way to not be able to do those things, if I were rejected and/or ejected by you, then I could not be in that position, could I? And, also possibly I would not feel such a hypocrite, or would anything have caused me not to feel that way, not sure, I can only look back on that time, as you said, with some amount of difficulty due to my own disdain of my actions."
"You know, looking back on the whole thing, the situation with Anne that is, I wonder why so many people were controlled by her so well, and why so many people seemed to look up to her, considering the way she treated everyone."
"I seem to find myself too challenged to try to hold true to what I really basically believe in rather than somehow following along with what the stronger, perhaps more dominating, leader person in that area wants me to conform to, but I cannot hold to truly aberrant (for me) behavior for long periods of time until I begin to break from the self-imposed pressure of that. Still, it is rather daunting at my age to realize that I have this continuous pitiful and to be despised by myself, need to be accepted for myself and yet, at the first sign of possible rejection, I find myself quickly determining that I can be something else. Not true!!!! thank goodness, thank the goddess, I am me in the long run."
I've learned more from the contents of these emails than I've ever learned from a whole book on psychology, and I'm grateful that Jane is willing to take the time, and endure the discomfort and embarrassment, to give a painfully honest description of how her own weaknesses and failings made it possible for Anne to turn her to the dark side; although I'm still hoping passionately that Jane will be able to recall at least a few specifics of what Anne said to her to persuade her to do some of the ugly things she eventually did, because my major goal is to know what tactics manipulators employ to persuade people that friends are in fact enemies, the revelations I'm being given are still priceless.
If you've ever seen people being manipulated, whether against you or against others, and I'm betting you HAVE seen this in action, and have been stunned and puzzled as to how it happened, as you'd pretty much have to be, I hope this has helped you as much as it has me. Stay tuned; with luck, there's lots more to come.
Manipulator: Why don't you stop being Sally's friend, and start treating her like dirt from now on?
Puppet: Sure, I'd be happy to repay Sally's love and trust with abuse.
so how DOES Sally end up having a friend turn into an enemy overnight for what looks to her like no reason? What are the magic words that are used to persuade the puppet, and what's the psychology behind it?
One of the truisms of human nature is that manipulators feel that they MUST be the central figure in whatever social group they're in, and if someone new shows up who does NOT show them deference, and, worse, who members of the group openly admire, war is declared, and the end result will virtually always be that the manipulator will turn the entire group against the interloper... because not one person in a million ever realizes that the manipulation is going on, or thinks the situation through to deduce who the bad guy REALLY is, or speaks up to or about the manipulator.
There was a time in my early days online when I was friends with 2 women who became friends with each other... and then out of the blue one day, one of those women attacked me like a rabid dog, and the other woman, although she pretended for a while that she was being neutral and staying my friend, had become her henchman (henchperson?). It ended badly, of course, and I assumed at the time that that was it... but several years later, the "henchman" contacted me begging for forgiveness, admitting to having been totally in the wrong, and that I was totally right about the manipulator, who had eventually turned on her as I'd predicted she would. We've been in touch periodically since then, but it just recently occurred to me that she represents a golden opportunity for me to find out how a "start treating your friend as an enemy" manipulation is handled; I sent her a lengthy email asking detailed questions about every aspect of how the ugly events between us were orchestrated by the manipulator, and she has sent me several emails with replies, with more to come because she's got lots more to explain... or, rather, I HOPE there'll be lots more, but realistically she may get tired of it before she's finished, which I'm prepared for. I'm going to share some of what she's sent me so far, even though it's mostly about what she thought and felt rather than what was said to her to persuade her; it's interesting stuff, and valuable in its own right. I'll call my friend turned enemy turned friend Jane, and the manipulator Anne. I've chosen to quote Jane directly, even though she rambles, so that you can get the information in her own words rather than via a summary and analysis by me, and see her struggle to make sense of what she now views as crazy behavior... and also see how some aspects of her story change as time goes on (the quotes are in chronological order), as she becomes more willing to admit that she KNEW she was being led astray and didn't fight it. I'm not even going to do my usual commentary between quotes, because nothing I could ever come up with would be as powerful as this:
"When I first started talking to Anne on-line, I was in a particularly vulnerable time and I suppose I was wanting something, a good friend, a confidant, someone to love me, I think all of the above. She mentored me too on things on the internet, things I really didn't know about, like how to download IM's like Yahoo and MSN and ICQ. She taught me how to use them and such as that. She spent a lot of time with me on line and I mean a LOT of time. She seemed to totally understand me and she was very, well, it was flattering and answered a deep need within me, I suppose. She was pretty good at drawing someone out and I suppose, it is part of her personality to do that, give a lot of attention to someone new, cultivate them, I suppose, until some how, some way, they were enamoured of her to the point that, I do not really know if I have the words, but it seems that by different things, perhaps confiding weaknesses and little secrets or intimacies of thoughts, I felt as if we were connected totally. I do remember noticing on more than one occasion that she had a great need to be the one in control and that she did not very well tolerate anyone whose opinion differed from hers, but, I think in the glow of our 'closeness', I felt it was something time and perserverance would change, amazing how we always feel that we can change them, take away their bad experiences, etc., be the true friend they have always needed and wanted, take away their fears, etc. As far as what she said to me to turn me against you and what I thought, I had seen your posts after you and she started fighting, or parts of them one time before she deleted them, and though I felt you might have had some truth to what you were saying, and it was your opinion, after all, she told me of other incidents where you had supposedly insulted her, etc., and that made you appear in the wrong although I truly knew better. I do not know everything, but I felt it was a very unfortunate thing and it could have, should have been discussed more, but I was afraid of forwarding that opinion too much as what effort I did make to say something along that lines caused a rather violent response from her, and, frankly, I was afraid she would delete me too, I am ashamed to say, I was afraid of that same thing."
"I can tell you one thing I have learned, more than anything else, through not only my experiences with Anne but also with other people since then. No one manipulates anyone to do something but what they allow them to manipulate them to do. As for all the why's and wherefore's, I am not sure I can answer for anyone other than myself, but I think in my case there was this strong need to be needed, to be wanted, to be accepted, to be loved, whatever, and an equally strong feeling that I did not deserve any of those things. I think that the 'manipulators' of the world recognize those weaknesses in others and hone in on them as a lionness hones in on the weakest member of a herd. Maybe there is a 'scent', lol, seriously, though since some of this was accomplished only on-line, there must be a way that that yearning and weakness is communicated through words alone, or something in the attitude, but I am as sure of that as I am that I am now stronger and not so 'needy', or at least I truly hope so, perhaps it is just that I no longer need to be needy as I am as needed as I need to be by the circumstances of life. Still, there is that weakness that is sensed by the predators out there and they are able to capitalize on it. Perhaps they know that what we fear the most is being abandoned by the one on whom we have placed our obsessesion. It also seems that those of us with this problem unconsciously or subconsciously choose someone whom we believe is wounded, hurt badly by others and we can be the hero, you know, we can save them, we can turn them to love anew, we can make them see the beauty and the reward of true love."
"I think, looking back that I knew that what she was saying wasn't right in some area or the other, but I simply chose not to act on those instincts. I have come to the conclusion that we all have to own our mistakes and I own those mistakes I made, but there are no excuses, there can only be truth, and truthfully, I chose to willfully ignore the warning signs I saw myself, the callous disregard for others, the need to be #1 with everyone, and I surely was able to convince myself, somehow, that in the long run I could maintain a friendship with you and still keep my relationship with Anne. Looking back, I know I compromised my own instincts there because truly I felt that whatever had started the argument, and again, I promise you that I did not read all the postings as I believe I had read only one part of it when she ended up deleting everything, what she showed me, I believe, was nothing, I simply relied on everything she told me as 100% truth, despite my feelings that there was more to it than I was hearing, I simply decided not to listen to my own feelings, once again, I believe that it was not so much that she told me anything, but that she emoted to me that only 100% support of her would do and that anything less would result in a loss of her in my life, which I wanted to avoid at all costs."
"The only thing I can say, looking back, with more knowledge of the workings of a bipolar mindset, is that those people who have that disease are truly masters at manipulation, they exist mainly during the times their disease is extremely active, by manipulating the emotions and weaknesses of others. They seem to have almost a sixth sense for those weaknesses and emotions they can manage too, but I am sure that we 'walking wounded' transmit all too clear signs to them that they can find something to do with."
"As to why I kept in contact with you even though I became increasingly hostile to you, well, I am not sure, I could say that it is possible that I simply wanted out of the situation I had put myself into, not being able to voluntarily give up Anne and yet wanting to stay around more positive influences which meant you and your group, but you in particular. I suppose the reason I became hostile to you when we hadn't had a fight was because I was being asked, no actually demanded by Anne to be a spy, and why I do not know, nor why I reported back to her, actually I do not understand any of why I did those things too well, you know, other than having this complete fascination, obsession, with Anne."
"As to why I got hostile to you, more so over time, I could only speculate that that might have been a result of my feeling guilty. Truly, I know that I did not really believe that you were the kind of person she was trying to make me believe you were, and yet, it seemed so absolutely necessary that you be that person, and the amount of pressure put on me to see what was being said and done her way, and try to act as a spy, well, that was a pressure, for sure. Perhaps it was a way to not be able to do those things, if I were rejected and/or ejected by you, then I could not be in that position, could I? And, also possibly I would not feel such a hypocrite, or would anything have caused me not to feel that way, not sure, I can only look back on that time, as you said, with some amount of difficulty due to my own disdain of my actions."
"You know, looking back on the whole thing, the situation with Anne that is, I wonder why so many people were controlled by her so well, and why so many people seemed to look up to her, considering the way she treated everyone."
"I seem to find myself too challenged to try to hold true to what I really basically believe in rather than somehow following along with what the stronger, perhaps more dominating, leader person in that area wants me to conform to, but I cannot hold to truly aberrant (for me) behavior for long periods of time until I begin to break from the self-imposed pressure of that. Still, it is rather daunting at my age to realize that I have this continuous pitiful and to be despised by myself, need to be accepted for myself and yet, at the first sign of possible rejection, I find myself quickly determining that I can be something else. Not true!!!! thank goodness, thank the goddess, I am me in the long run."
I've learned more from the contents of these emails than I've ever learned from a whole book on psychology, and I'm grateful that Jane is willing to take the time, and endure the discomfort and embarrassment, to give a painfully honest description of how her own weaknesses and failings made it possible for Anne to turn her to the dark side; although I'm still hoping passionately that Jane will be able to recall at least a few specifics of what Anne said to her to persuade her to do some of the ugly things she eventually did, because my major goal is to know what tactics manipulators employ to persuade people that friends are in fact enemies, the revelations I'm being given are still priceless.
If you've ever seen people being manipulated, whether against you or against others, and I'm betting you HAVE seen this in action, and have been stunned and puzzled as to how it happened, as you'd pretty much have to be, I hope this has helped you as much as it has me. Stay tuned; with luck, there's lots more to come.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
The sexiest photo ever taken
It's not of an actor, or a singer, or a model; he was a gunner on a patrol plane in WWII... I don't know what his name is, as it was apparently never recorded. The image is black and white, so I can't tell if his rumpled light-colored hair was blond or maybe red; his skin isn't freckled, which means he was most likely blond. His face is turned away so that it shows less than a profile, but it's enough to show he was handsome; the nose is straight, the lips hint at fullness, the chin looks strong and the cheekbones high. The sliver of iris visible suggests light eyes; most likely blue, and I imagine them being a pale translucent shade, for no reason I can justify. His body has no gym bunny muscles, but is the body of a trim, healthy, active young (I'd guess under 25) man who has better things to do than sit in a weight room. He's not doing anything sexual in the photo, he's not posed, not flexing anything, and although he's naked only his backside is showing, and even that's in shadow... so why is it so sexy?
What makes this photograph thrilling, powerful, indicative of the purest and noblest sort of maleness, and therefore sexy at a level that no porn pic could ever come close to, is the story behind it, which can be found in the December 2002 issue of B&W magazine, in an article about the man who took the picture, Horace Bristol; he was a member of a Navy unit of photographers, and thus ended up being on the plane the gunner was serving on, which was used to rescue people from Rabaul Bay (New Britain island, Papua New Guinea), when this occurred:
"...we got a call to pick up an airman who was down in the Bay. The Japanese were shooting at him from the island, and when they saw us they started shooting at us. The man who was shot down was temporarily blinded, so one of our crew stripped off his clothes and jumped in to bring him aboard. He couldn't have swum very well wearing his boots and clothes. As soon as we could, we took off. We weren't waiting around for anybody to put on formal clothes. We were being shot at and wanted to get the hell out of there. The naked man got back into his position at his gun in the blister of the plane."
THAT'S what makes the photo so sexy; he was a HERO. A hero photographed right after he'd completed his heroic act. NAKED. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only nude photo of a hero ever taken, much less one where he's still in action; he's manning his gun in the picture, with water beaded on his back and headphones over his wet hair, tense with alertness and concentration, and seems totally unaware that his goods are still hanging out, so to speak. A naked man in what are clearly military surroundings (there's even a series of images of ships with the header "This is the enemy" to the right of his butt, so you KNOW there's a war going on) sounds like something that'd be set up for a gay porn movie, but this is no porn star displaying a shaved body half out of a costume uniform, this is the real deal, presumably the only time such a thing has ever happened much less been captured on film... and it blows my mind every time I look at it.
Are you ready to see the photo? Remember, there's a naked butt in it, so don't look if that will bother you:
http://www.artnet.com/artwork/425946744/423969340/pby-blister-gunner-rescue-at-rabaul.html
Its full title as given in the article is "PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul," and it was taken in 1944... so the hero is at best a very old man now, and could easily be dead-he might not even have survived the war. Did he notice the photo being taken? Did he ever see it? Did he know that the pic of him became famous? Did it occur to him at any time that flinging himself naked out of a plane with bullets flying around, rescuing a man who would have surely died otherwise, and then racing back to his post still naked and wet, was something extraordinary, or did he shrug it off as doing his duty and never think twice about it?
Did anyone ever tell him that he had a world-class butt?
I hope you were at the very least impressed by this bit of history... and that maybe a few of you will feel the same way I do about this astonishing photo.
What makes this photograph thrilling, powerful, indicative of the purest and noblest sort of maleness, and therefore sexy at a level that no porn pic could ever come close to, is the story behind it, which can be found in the December 2002 issue of B&W magazine, in an article about the man who took the picture, Horace Bristol; he was a member of a Navy unit of photographers, and thus ended up being on the plane the gunner was serving on, which was used to rescue people from Rabaul Bay (New Britain island, Papua New Guinea), when this occurred:
"...we got a call to pick up an airman who was down in the Bay. The Japanese were shooting at him from the island, and when they saw us they started shooting at us. The man who was shot down was temporarily blinded, so one of our crew stripped off his clothes and jumped in to bring him aboard. He couldn't have swum very well wearing his boots and clothes. As soon as we could, we took off. We weren't waiting around for anybody to put on formal clothes. We were being shot at and wanted to get the hell out of there. The naked man got back into his position at his gun in the blister of the plane."
THAT'S what makes the photo so sexy; he was a HERO. A hero photographed right after he'd completed his heroic act. NAKED. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only nude photo of a hero ever taken, much less one where he's still in action; he's manning his gun in the picture, with water beaded on his back and headphones over his wet hair, tense with alertness and concentration, and seems totally unaware that his goods are still hanging out, so to speak. A naked man in what are clearly military surroundings (there's even a series of images of ships with the header "This is the enemy" to the right of his butt, so you KNOW there's a war going on) sounds like something that'd be set up for a gay porn movie, but this is no porn star displaying a shaved body half out of a costume uniform, this is the real deal, presumably the only time such a thing has ever happened much less been captured on film... and it blows my mind every time I look at it.
Are you ready to see the photo? Remember, there's a naked butt in it, so don't look if that will bother you:
http://www.artnet.com/artwork/425946744/423969340/pby-blister-gunner-rescue-at-rabaul.html
Its full title as given in the article is "PBY Blister Gunner, Rescue at Rabaul," and it was taken in 1944... so the hero is at best a very old man now, and could easily be dead-he might not even have survived the war. Did he notice the photo being taken? Did he ever see it? Did he know that the pic of him became famous? Did it occur to him at any time that flinging himself naked out of a plane with bullets flying around, rescuing a man who would have surely died otherwise, and then racing back to his post still naked and wet, was something extraordinary, or did he shrug it off as doing his duty and never think twice about it?
Did anyone ever tell him that he had a world-class butt?
I hope you were at the very least impressed by this bit of history... and that maybe a few of you will feel the same way I do about this astonishing photo.
Monday, November 28, 2005
The evolution of my home
I posted on 9-7-05 that my husband had at long, LONG last agreed to clear the boxes and piles of his junk out of our house, where they fill most of the rooms floor to ceiling, making it very belatedly possible for us to have furniture, to set up a guest room so that friends can stay here, and for me to show people my home with pride rather than with explanations. Although he'd promised at that time that this process would begin right away, it took him a couple of weeks just to rent a storage unit; he got the 1st load of stuff taken there pretty soon after, but then that big empty unit that we're PAYING for sat there essentially empty until now, almost 3 MONTHS later, when he's used the Thanksgiving holiday to FINALLY get the project moving.
Even HE has been amazed at how much of his lovingly packed stuff is literally garbage; he's keeping more than he really should, but he IS throwing out a decent amount of things too. In addition, he's gone from vehemently denying that most of his boxes were less than half full, even on the many occasions when I dragged him over to the stacks and pointed out the level in box after box, to voluntarily consolidating similar items. The end result of these 2 things is that the empty boxes are piling up, proving the point I've made endlessly that he has far less stuff than he thought he did, and thus can take up far less space with it than he's been wasting, grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Typically, we've had numerous battles during this process; he keeps stopping and trying to insist that he "can't" store enough of his things to clear the rooms for proper use, and I have to keep pointing out that his clothes and tech equipment are the only items out of this warehouse worth of stuff that he's actually USING, and thus that every single other thing can validly be stored, and in fact he's being asked to store far less than that, since he can still pack his study with his junk... so he hasn't got a case, which sadly never stops him from arguing and sulking but at least keeps him from calling a halt.
He actually tried to sneak a couple of the few boxes there are of MY stuff past me and into the car to be stored withOUT my consent; a fight ensued over that as well, in which I made it crystal clear that there's no way he's got any right to even SUGGEST that my stuff go to storage as long as he has a greater volume of boxes stored in our home than I do... I am NOT going to have my precious collectables taken where I can't easily get to them to allow him to have a few more boxes of old magazines that should just be tossed sitting around where he can look at them.
Although as always he accomplished WAY less over the long weekend than he promised, in particular he didn't rent the Rug Doctor and bring out the Christmas tree, the former of which is desperately needed and the latter of which he'd promised all year to do (the battle to have the tree up before December 24th is now officially underway), he got a decent chunk of stuff processed and either thrown out or sorted, and he's got another stack of boxes ready to go; it's already making a big difference in how the house looks.
As I'm writing this, he's carrying boxes of magazines out to his car, some of the same boxes he'd argued quite aggressively that he could NEVER have where he can't get right to them when the one time a decade comes when he'd actually open one of them; the world hasn't come to an end, so it looks like he CAN have those boxes somewhere other than filling up my future guest room, imagine that, lol.
There's still a gargantuan amount of work left to be done before we get down to bare rooms that can be furnished and decorated, and the furnishing and decorating themselves will be huge projects, as will bringing my stuff here from my mother's house, but what matters is that it's HAPPENING... I'm in the midst of the process that will lead to me having a REAL home. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh
Even HE has been amazed at how much of his lovingly packed stuff is literally garbage; he's keeping more than he really should, but he IS throwing out a decent amount of things too. In addition, he's gone from vehemently denying that most of his boxes were less than half full, even on the many occasions when I dragged him over to the stacks and pointed out the level in box after box, to voluntarily consolidating similar items. The end result of these 2 things is that the empty boxes are piling up, proving the point I've made endlessly that he has far less stuff than he thought he did, and thus can take up far less space with it than he's been wasting, grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Typically, we've had numerous battles during this process; he keeps stopping and trying to insist that he "can't" store enough of his things to clear the rooms for proper use, and I have to keep pointing out that his clothes and tech equipment are the only items out of this warehouse worth of stuff that he's actually USING, and thus that every single other thing can validly be stored, and in fact he's being asked to store far less than that, since he can still pack his study with his junk... so he hasn't got a case, which sadly never stops him from arguing and sulking but at least keeps him from calling a halt.
He actually tried to sneak a couple of the few boxes there are of MY stuff past me and into the car to be stored withOUT my consent; a fight ensued over that as well, in which I made it crystal clear that there's no way he's got any right to even SUGGEST that my stuff go to storage as long as he has a greater volume of boxes stored in our home than I do... I am NOT going to have my precious collectables taken where I can't easily get to them to allow him to have a few more boxes of old magazines that should just be tossed sitting around where he can look at them.
Although as always he accomplished WAY less over the long weekend than he promised, in particular he didn't rent the Rug Doctor and bring out the Christmas tree, the former of which is desperately needed and the latter of which he'd promised all year to do (the battle to have the tree up before December 24th is now officially underway), he got a decent chunk of stuff processed and either thrown out or sorted, and he's got another stack of boxes ready to go; it's already making a big difference in how the house looks.
As I'm writing this, he's carrying boxes of magazines out to his car, some of the same boxes he'd argued quite aggressively that he could NEVER have where he can't get right to them when the one time a decade comes when he'd actually open one of them; the world hasn't come to an end, so it looks like he CAN have those boxes somewhere other than filling up my future guest room, imagine that, lol.
There's still a gargantuan amount of work left to be done before we get down to bare rooms that can be furnished and decorated, and the furnishing and decorating themselves will be huge projects, as will bringing my stuff here from my mother's house, but what matters is that it's HAPPENING... I'm in the midst of the process that will lead to me having a REAL home. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh
Sunday, November 27, 2005
An amazing thing that influences intelligence
We can mean 2 different things when we refer to intelligence; the 1st is a person's ability to think, and the 2nd is how much they know... granted, the ability to think influences the ability to know some things at a level beyond memorizing facts that you don't grasp the meaning of, and usually people with the ability to "think well" seek to gain more knowledge, but there are still 2 concepts involved.
Intelligence in the "ability to think" sense is obviously inborn, despite how fashionable it is in some circles to pretend that we're all born with equal potential; within every socioeconomic group, there are kids that develop at a wide range of paces, with a wide range of talents, and, when they get old enough to be directly educated, that learn with a wide range of speeds... no matter what you do, there are kids who always struggle, and kids who rocket ahead effortlessly. I think that most people's maximum possible level of intellectual functioning, which they'd achieve under the ideal circumstances, is probably WAY beyond what they'd have with little or no development of their innate abilities, but there's no amount of educating that'll make a kid the next Einstein if they don't have the intrinsic brainpower; all anyone can do is make the best of what they're born with.
We want our kids to be developing their ability to think and increasing their knowledge in school; the combination of those 2 things is what we see as their academic performance. Many factors have been found to influence how well children perform:
Wealthier parents are more likely to be educated, to try to help their kids learn, to give them books and educational toys, take them to museums, provide them with better nutrition and health care, and all the other things that give more privileged kids a higher average level of grades and test scores in this country.
Even the poorest parents can stimulate their kids' minds by talking to them, singing to them, reading to them, and taking the time to teach them "the 3 R's"; we've all seen countless reports of how big a difference this sort of parental involvement makes.
The quality of educational opportunities a child has clearly has a huge impact; the level of qualification of the teachers, the class sizes, the book budget, and all sorts of other elements of the schools a kid attends affect how much of what they need (which varies from child to child) to nurture their mental progress they actually receive.
What we have NOT seen is any evidence that a child's, or anyone's, IQ (Intelligence Quotient) scores, which measure basic cognitive abilities and thus supposedly (it's hotly debated) come the closest to measuring intelligence, can be increased; since IQ exams are supposed to test for JUST intelligence, NOT knowledge or level of education, the scores are supposed stay pretty steady throughout life
http://people.howstuffworks.com/question455.htm
There's apparently an exception to this, though, as I discovered here
http://ed.stanford.edu/suse/news-bureau/displayRecord.php?tablename=notify1&id=146
which shows that for kids in grades 3 and below, and to a lesser amount in 4th and 5th graders, something CAN actually increase their IQ scores:
"In the classic 1968 study Pygmalion in the Classroom, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson demonstrated that raised teacher expectations could, in fact, be directly correlated with student success. In their Oak School experiment, they randomly identified certain children as likely to 'spurt' or 'bloom.' Neither the children nor their parents knew of this designation, but teachers apparently reacted by expecting the children identified (the experimental group) to outshine their peers. After a year, these students had gained significantly on their IQ tests."
How could children's IQ scores change because of beliefs about them held by their teachers? My 1st thought, and probably yours too, was that the teachers gave the kids they believed to be gifted special educational opportunities that enhanced their abilities at test-taking (in the same way that older kids can attend classes that teach them how to do better on other sorts of standardized tests like the SAT's), but that's not the case:
"The children in the experimental group were different from their peers in only one respect: Their teachers expected them to perform well. 'There was no crash program to improve [these students'] reading ability, no special lesson plan, no extra time tutoring, no trips to museums or art galleries. There was only the belief that the children bore watching, that they had intellectual competencies that would in due course be revealed.'"
And there's also this, which is far less astonishing but still meaningful:
"Standards proponents Marc S. Tucker and Judy B. Codding also decry 'the tragedy of low expectations.' In their 1998 book Standards for Our Schools, they write: 'One of the most striking features of countries that are more successful than we in educating their students to high standards is the assumption made by parents, teachers, and the students themselves that the students can do it. By contrast, the single most important obstacle to high student achievement in the United States is our low expectations for students- not just students who are poor and come from minority backgrounds, but ... most of our students.'"
Did you have any idea that expectations were such an issue? What I'd really like to know, of course, is HOW the attitude of the teachers translated to an alteration in students' IQ scores; it's been nearly 40 years since that study was done, but no medical or scientific explanation is given for how the children's ability to perform on IQ tests changed... does that mean they didn't do any research to try and figure it out? Although the obvious differences in the ways a teacher might treat a child perceived as gifted, which might encourage a child to work harder, are often described, nothing I was able to find after a reasonable amount of searching turned up any evidence that the mechanism leading to the IQ increase (which can't be caused by hard work) had been pursued at all since 1968; doesn't that strike you as a little odd? They didn't say how much the increase was, so it can't have been huge, but every parent and grandparent would be eager for their tax dollars to fund research that might lead to their little darlings having even a small increase in IQ, so... where's the research? Don't they WANT to know what they can train teachers to do to give little kids higher IQ's?
They know so little about how the brain works that, even if they start studying it tomorrow, we probably have a long wait for answers on this topic... but we can use the information even without the explanation, and we should, since
"... even the harshest critics conceded the basic conclusion of the study: teacher expectations are correlated with behavior and achievement. This same study has been replicated in educational settings from kindergarten to graduate and professional schools. Decades of follow-up research have confirmed the existence of the phenomenon"
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/profiles/glesnerfines/Expectations.htm
Parents, YOU are by far the biggest influence on your kids; no one disputes that, nor should they ever. However, you have to use the knowledge that little kids can receive a real effect on their IQ's if their teachers believe in them to spur you to think long and hard about if your children are being taught by the right people; if your child's teachers don't seem enthusiastic about your child and her/his prospects for learning, or, worse, if there's even one teacher who doesn't get along with your child and is looking for the worst in her/him rather than expecting the best, your child is getting CHEATED of their chance to have the lifelong benefits of a higher IQ, or, more importantly, higher scholastic achievement... and it's time to take action.
Intelligence in the "ability to think" sense is obviously inborn, despite how fashionable it is in some circles to pretend that we're all born with equal potential; within every socioeconomic group, there are kids that develop at a wide range of paces, with a wide range of talents, and, when they get old enough to be directly educated, that learn with a wide range of speeds... no matter what you do, there are kids who always struggle, and kids who rocket ahead effortlessly. I think that most people's maximum possible level of intellectual functioning, which they'd achieve under the ideal circumstances, is probably WAY beyond what they'd have with little or no development of their innate abilities, but there's no amount of educating that'll make a kid the next Einstein if they don't have the intrinsic brainpower; all anyone can do is make the best of what they're born with.
We want our kids to be developing their ability to think and increasing their knowledge in school; the combination of those 2 things is what we see as their academic performance. Many factors have been found to influence how well children perform:
Wealthier parents are more likely to be educated, to try to help their kids learn, to give them books and educational toys, take them to museums, provide them with better nutrition and health care, and all the other things that give more privileged kids a higher average level of grades and test scores in this country.
Even the poorest parents can stimulate their kids' minds by talking to them, singing to them, reading to them, and taking the time to teach them "the 3 R's"; we've all seen countless reports of how big a difference this sort of parental involvement makes.
The quality of educational opportunities a child has clearly has a huge impact; the level of qualification of the teachers, the class sizes, the book budget, and all sorts of other elements of the schools a kid attends affect how much of what they need (which varies from child to child) to nurture their mental progress they actually receive.
What we have NOT seen is any evidence that a child's, or anyone's, IQ (Intelligence Quotient) scores, which measure basic cognitive abilities and thus supposedly (it's hotly debated) come the closest to measuring intelligence, can be increased; since IQ exams are supposed to test for JUST intelligence, NOT knowledge or level of education, the scores are supposed stay pretty steady throughout life
http://people.howstuffworks.com/question455.htm
There's apparently an exception to this, though, as I discovered here
http://ed.stanford.edu/suse/news-bureau/displayRecord.php?tablename=notify1&id=146
which shows that for kids in grades 3 and below, and to a lesser amount in 4th and 5th graders, something CAN actually increase their IQ scores:
"In the classic 1968 study Pygmalion in the Classroom, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson demonstrated that raised teacher expectations could, in fact, be directly correlated with student success. In their Oak School experiment, they randomly identified certain children as likely to 'spurt' or 'bloom.' Neither the children nor their parents knew of this designation, but teachers apparently reacted by expecting the children identified (the experimental group) to outshine their peers. After a year, these students had gained significantly on their IQ tests."
How could children's IQ scores change because of beliefs about them held by their teachers? My 1st thought, and probably yours too, was that the teachers gave the kids they believed to be gifted special educational opportunities that enhanced their abilities at test-taking (in the same way that older kids can attend classes that teach them how to do better on other sorts of standardized tests like the SAT's), but that's not the case:
"The children in the experimental group were different from their peers in only one respect: Their teachers expected them to perform well. 'There was no crash program to improve [these students'] reading ability, no special lesson plan, no extra time tutoring, no trips to museums or art galleries. There was only the belief that the children bore watching, that they had intellectual competencies that would in due course be revealed.'"
And there's also this, which is far less astonishing but still meaningful:
"Standards proponents Marc S. Tucker and Judy B. Codding also decry 'the tragedy of low expectations.' In their 1998 book Standards for Our Schools, they write: 'One of the most striking features of countries that are more successful than we in educating their students to high standards is the assumption made by parents, teachers, and the students themselves that the students can do it. By contrast, the single most important obstacle to high student achievement in the United States is our low expectations for students- not just students who are poor and come from minority backgrounds, but ... most of our students.'"
Did you have any idea that expectations were such an issue? What I'd really like to know, of course, is HOW the attitude of the teachers translated to an alteration in students' IQ scores; it's been nearly 40 years since that study was done, but no medical or scientific explanation is given for how the children's ability to perform on IQ tests changed... does that mean they didn't do any research to try and figure it out? Although the obvious differences in the ways a teacher might treat a child perceived as gifted, which might encourage a child to work harder, are often described, nothing I was able to find after a reasonable amount of searching turned up any evidence that the mechanism leading to the IQ increase (which can't be caused by hard work) had been pursued at all since 1968; doesn't that strike you as a little odd? They didn't say how much the increase was, so it can't have been huge, but every parent and grandparent would be eager for their tax dollars to fund research that might lead to their little darlings having even a small increase in IQ, so... where's the research? Don't they WANT to know what they can train teachers to do to give little kids higher IQ's?
They know so little about how the brain works that, even if they start studying it tomorrow, we probably have a long wait for answers on this topic... but we can use the information even without the explanation, and we should, since
"... even the harshest critics conceded the basic conclusion of the study: teacher expectations are correlated with behavior and achievement. This same study has been replicated in educational settings from kindergarten to graduate and professional schools. Decades of follow-up research have confirmed the existence of the phenomenon"
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/profiles/glesnerfines/Expectations.htm
Parents, YOU are by far the biggest influence on your kids; no one disputes that, nor should they ever. However, you have to use the knowledge that little kids can receive a real effect on their IQ's if their teachers believe in them to spur you to think long and hard about if your children are being taught by the right people; if your child's teachers don't seem enthusiastic about your child and her/his prospects for learning, or, worse, if there's even one teacher who doesn't get along with your child and is looking for the worst in her/him rather than expecting the best, your child is getting CHEATED of their chance to have the lifelong benefits of a higher IQ, or, more importantly, higher scholastic achievement... and it's time to take action.
