Sunday, May 06, 2007
Do you think for yourself?
Ok, now ask yourself that question again and really think about the answer. Still sure you're a rugged individualist?
Do you have the same political beliefs as your parents? Or the exact opposite ones? Or ones that match the views you encountered in college? Or the same ones as your romantic partner or social group? If you answered "yes" to any of those, and you didn't do an in-depth objective analysis the conclusions of which coincidentally fell into one of those categories, you're not thinking for yourself.
Do you have the same religious beliefs as your parents? If you said "yes," unless the reason for it is that your deity appeared to you and confirmed that you'd picked the one true religion, you're not thinking for yourself.
If asked your opinion on an issue, does your reply parallel what you read or heard from the media, or, worse, on a blog? Unless you did independent fact-checking and, again, in-depth analysis, that just happened to dovetail with those NON-objective sources, you're not thinking for yourself.
If you're asked what music, movies, etc you like, and what comes out of your mouth is whatever's currently popular, either among your circle of acquaintance or in general... do I even have to say it? Popularity is probably the most powerful influence on the average person's preferences; if something is perceived as being popular, even among total strangers whose tastes are unknown, people rush blindly to that thing rather than looking at the ones that are closest to what they already know they like. The New York Times has a fascinating article on this topic called "Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?":
"people almost never make decisions independently - in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the 'best' of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing."
"when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called 'cumulative advantage,' or the 'rich get richer' effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors"
Ahhhhhh, I love to find out why folks do the silly things they do. In case you don't believe the explanation, fear not, they proved it with an experiment:
"more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5124&en=79be2f770fc76c6d&ex=1334203200
Do I need to quote any more? You know what happened when people could see how many times each song had been downloaded, right? You can give a little slack to those who're influenced by their loved/liked ones raving about something, or even by strangers if they can see excited faces or hear excited voices, since we absorb each others' emotions so readily, but to just see NUMBERS and be so influenced by those tiny traces of strangers' preferences is pretty scary... and I'll bet that every person thus manipulated would swear to their dying breath that they always think for themselves.
Human beings are social animals, and as such it's natural for us to be affected by what those around us think and feel; that undoubtedly served us well in our primitive days, when we had to all want the same things and work towards the same goals in order to survive. There aren't many of us in the modern world who want to live our lives with others doing our thinking for us, so it's up to each of us to look at all our opinions and ask "WHY do I feel that way?", and to be willing to devote some serious skull-sweat to each topic that we can't find a solid reason for holding our current view on.... only then will we truly be thinking for ourselves.
Do you have the same political beliefs as your parents? Or the exact opposite ones? Or ones that match the views you encountered in college? Or the same ones as your romantic partner or social group? If you answered "yes" to any of those, and you didn't do an in-depth objective analysis the conclusions of which coincidentally fell into one of those categories, you're not thinking for yourself.
Do you have the same religious beliefs as your parents? If you said "yes," unless the reason for it is that your deity appeared to you and confirmed that you'd picked the one true religion, you're not thinking for yourself.
If asked your opinion on an issue, does your reply parallel what you read or heard from the media, or, worse, on a blog? Unless you did independent fact-checking and, again, in-depth analysis, that just happened to dovetail with those NON-objective sources, you're not thinking for yourself.
If you're asked what music, movies, etc you like, and what comes out of your mouth is whatever's currently popular, either among your circle of acquaintance or in general... do I even have to say it? Popularity is probably the most powerful influence on the average person's preferences; if something is perceived as being popular, even among total strangers whose tastes are unknown, people rush blindly to that thing rather than looking at the ones that are closest to what they already know they like. The New York Times has a fascinating article on this topic called "Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?":
"people almost never make decisions independently - in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the 'best' of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing."
"when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called 'cumulative advantage,' or the 'rich get richer' effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors"
Ahhhhhh, I love to find out why folks do the silly things they do. In case you don't believe the explanation, fear not, they proved it with an experiment:
"more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5124&en=79be2f770fc76c6d&ex=1334203200
Do I need to quote any more? You know what happened when people could see how many times each song had been downloaded, right? You can give a little slack to those who're influenced by their loved/liked ones raving about something, or even by strangers if they can see excited faces or hear excited voices, since we absorb each others' emotions so readily, but to just see NUMBERS and be so influenced by those tiny traces of strangers' preferences is pretty scary... and I'll bet that every person thus manipulated would swear to their dying breath that they always think for themselves.
Human beings are social animals, and as such it's natural for us to be affected by what those around us think and feel; that undoubtedly served us well in our primitive days, when we had to all want the same things and work towards the same goals in order to survive. There aren't many of us in the modern world who want to live our lives with others doing our thinking for us, so it's up to each of us to look at all our opinions and ask "WHY do I feel that way?", and to be willing to devote some serious skull-sweat to each topic that we can't find a solid reason for holding our current view on.... only then will we truly be thinking for ourselves.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Is testosterone one of the causes of evil?
No, this isn't a man-bashing post; it's about people with higher-than-average levels of testosterone for their gender. With that said; we take it so for granted that the overwhelming majority of crimes, especially violent ones, are committed by MEN that we don't wonder WHY... all *I* ever thought about it was that testosterone often leads to aggression, and aggression can be the root of criminal behavior, but that's clearly not a sufficient explanation. If testosterone is part of what creates, not just aggression, but EVIL, that'd explain alot; here's the 1st hint that this could be so (asterisks mine):
"Most people don't appreciate an angry look, but a new University of Michigan psychology study found that ***some people find angry expressions so rewarding that they will readily learn ways to encourage them.***
'It's kind of striking that an angry facial expression is consciously valued as a very negative signal by almost everyone, yet at a non-conscious level can be like a tasty morsel that some people will vigorously work for,' said Oliver Schultheiss, co-author of the study and a U-M associate professor of psychology."
This is horrifying, of course, but shouldn't come as a surprise; we've all known people who clearly enjoy being able to upset others... but did you ever consider what the psychological mechanism could be that'd cause them to have that response? They're bad people, yes, but what's in their brains that MAKES them bad; abnormal physical structures, alteration to mental pathways due to trauma... or, reasonably enough, hormonal or other chemical differences? (Evil is so huge and so varied that it almost certainly arises from a combination of things, but we need to know what they ARE.) This article doesn't explicitly make the connection that people who have this anti-social response are evil, but there's no other word for those that get a kick out of making others angry; nice folks don't react that way.
"They took saliva samples from participants to measure testosterone, a hormone that has been associated with dominance motivation.
Participants then worked on a 'learning task' in which one complex sequence of keypresses was followed by an angry face on the screen, another sequence was followed by a neutral face, and a third sequence was followed by no face.
Participants who were high in testosterone relative to other members of their sex learned the sequence that was followed by an angry face better than the other sequences, while participants low in testosterone did not show this learning advantage for sequences that were reinforced by an angry face.
Notably, ***this effect emerged more strongly in response to faces that were presented subliminally,*** that is, too fast to allow conscious identification. Perhaps just as noteworthy, participants were not aware of the patterns in the sequences of keypresses as they learned them.
While high-testosterone participants showed better learning in response to anger faces, they were unaware of the fact that they learned anything in the first place and unaware of what kind of faces had reinforced their learning.
Wirth, the lead author of the study and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added: 'Better learning of a task associated with anger faces indicates that the anger faces were rewarding, as in a rat that learns to press a lever in order to receive a tasty treat. In that sense, anger faces seemed to be rewarding for high-testosterone people, but aversive for low-testosterone people.'"
http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=3209
I don't have to point out how powerful and deeply ingrained the enjoyment of angry looks has to be for it to work subliminally, right? There might've been some gray area if they'd been showing the angry faces of those the subjects dislike or are competitive with, but they were using the faces of strangers, so all this can be is the pure love of the anger of others... pure evil.
What IS evil? We don't know. We're finally emerging from the shameful days of imagining that so-called "mental illnesses" arose from some mystical thing separate from our physical beings (a mystical thing inexplicably affected by medication) and accepting that they, like every other affliction, are caused by PHYSICAL issues (mostly from imbalances of neurotransmitters in the brain); it's high time that we grasp that evil MUST arise from physical sources as well. Can we be genetically predisposed to be evil? How about genetically CERTAIN? We don't know. Are the brains of evil people fundamentally different, as the brains of schizophrenics typically are? Which of the wide variety of chemical and electrical processes our brains possess are abnormal in evil people? We don't know... and can you think of any possible excuse as to WHY we don't know, and why as best as I can determine no one's studying this? We should be dragging every serial killer and equivalent scumbag in our prisons out of their cells and into research centers to do every test and scan in existence on them, right down to their DNA, to see exactly how their brains differ from those of decent human beings; once we know what the sources of evil are, we've got a shot at what would be the greatest advance in all of human history... treatments, or even CURES, for evil.
"Most people don't appreciate an angry look, but a new University of Michigan psychology study found that ***some people find angry expressions so rewarding that they will readily learn ways to encourage them.***
'It's kind of striking that an angry facial expression is consciously valued as a very negative signal by almost everyone, yet at a non-conscious level can be like a tasty morsel that some people will vigorously work for,' said Oliver Schultheiss, co-author of the study and a U-M associate professor of psychology."
This is horrifying, of course, but shouldn't come as a surprise; we've all known people who clearly enjoy being able to upset others... but did you ever consider what the psychological mechanism could be that'd cause them to have that response? They're bad people, yes, but what's in their brains that MAKES them bad; abnormal physical structures, alteration to mental pathways due to trauma... or, reasonably enough, hormonal or other chemical differences? (Evil is so huge and so varied that it almost certainly arises from a combination of things, but we need to know what they ARE.) This article doesn't explicitly make the connection that people who have this anti-social response are evil, but there's no other word for those that get a kick out of making others angry; nice folks don't react that way.
"They took saliva samples from participants to measure testosterone, a hormone that has been associated with dominance motivation.
Participants then worked on a 'learning task' in which one complex sequence of keypresses was followed by an angry face on the screen, another sequence was followed by a neutral face, and a third sequence was followed by no face.
Participants who were high in testosterone relative to other members of their sex learned the sequence that was followed by an angry face better than the other sequences, while participants low in testosterone did not show this learning advantage for sequences that were reinforced by an angry face.
Notably, ***this effect emerged more strongly in response to faces that were presented subliminally,*** that is, too fast to allow conscious identification. Perhaps just as noteworthy, participants were not aware of the patterns in the sequences of keypresses as they learned them.
While high-testosterone participants showed better learning in response to anger faces, they were unaware of the fact that they learned anything in the first place and unaware of what kind of faces had reinforced their learning.
Wirth, the lead author of the study and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added: 'Better learning of a task associated with anger faces indicates that the anger faces were rewarding, as in a rat that learns to press a lever in order to receive a tasty treat. In that sense, anger faces seemed to be rewarding for high-testosterone people, but aversive for low-testosterone people.'"
http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=3209
I don't have to point out how powerful and deeply ingrained the enjoyment of angry looks has to be for it to work subliminally, right? There might've been some gray area if they'd been showing the angry faces of those the subjects dislike or are competitive with, but they were using the faces of strangers, so all this can be is the pure love of the anger of others... pure evil.
What IS evil? We don't know. We're finally emerging from the shameful days of imagining that so-called "mental illnesses" arose from some mystical thing separate from our physical beings (a mystical thing inexplicably affected by medication) and accepting that they, like every other affliction, are caused by PHYSICAL issues (mostly from imbalances of neurotransmitters in the brain); it's high time that we grasp that evil MUST arise from physical sources as well. Can we be genetically predisposed to be evil? How about genetically CERTAIN? We don't know. Are the brains of evil people fundamentally different, as the brains of schizophrenics typically are? Which of the wide variety of chemical and electrical processes our brains possess are abnormal in evil people? We don't know... and can you think of any possible excuse as to WHY we don't know, and why as best as I can determine no one's studying this? We should be dragging every serial killer and equivalent scumbag in our prisons out of their cells and into research centers to do every test and scan in existence on them, right down to their DNA, to see exactly how their brains differ from those of decent human beings; once we know what the sources of evil are, we've got a shot at what would be the greatest advance in all of human history... treatments, or even CURES, for evil.
