How to turn the Other Side into cartoonish villains? Let me count the ways …
Viewing entries tagged
Psychology
The feeder streams of happiness include:
Sense of control: you can actually change a situation
Sense of purpose: there are things you want to achieve
…
Personal initiative is a proactive and goal-oriented mindset, characterized by long-term focus and persistence in the face of obstacles and setbacks. Such a mindset is action-oriented, planful, and anticipatory: quickly turning goals into actions - with back-up plans ready just in case.
Empathy is also associated with ingroup bias and outgroup antagonism. One is more likely to feel the joys and sorrows of some people more than others, especially if they’re the same ethnicity.
The placebo effect has also been found in interventions designed to improve cognitive functioning in areas such as intelligence, attention, memory, and self-control.
It’s hard to wrap one’s head around the idea of being a machine with free will. It would be easier if we expanded our understanding of machine and shrank our notion of free will.
The capacity to imagine future danger and take constructive steps to avert it is called “adaptive anticipation”. Adaptive adaptation starts with sensitivity to threat. It ends with effective problem solving.
According to this trope, the Fearful Conservative is afraid of change and uncertainty, clinging to the safe harbor of habit and tradition, overly controlled, troubled by bad dreams and distressed by disorder. In so many words: fear makes conservatives stupid. The authors usually bolster their case with a few studies and quotes from “experts”, which can be hard to refute if you don’t know what they’re leaving out - namely, evidence to the contrary.
One thing the articles and opinion pieces don’t mention is the decades of research on personality and political attitudes, covering tens of thousands of participants. And that research is, well, unequivocal: conservatism is not associated with anxiety or fear - it’s most strongly associated with Conscientiousness.
Azarian wrote a Psychology Today piece titled, “Fear and Anxiety Drive Conservatives' Political Attitudes” …he supported his claims with evidence from four studies. Luckily I was able to locate most of the original studies to see if his conclusions were reasonable. Here’s what I found…
For instance, in one Pew research survey, just 53% of those under 30 who initially identified as Republicans or leaned Republican consistently remained with the party over four subsequent surveys.
…in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky concludes a discussion of MFT with the claim that “…conservatives heavily value loyalty, authority, and sanctity.”
“…a four-year old’s openness to a new toy predicts how open she’ll be as an adult to, say, the US forging new relations with Iran and Cuba.” — Robert Sapolsky (2017) Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
What I see here is that the two conservative groups have done rather well, despite their limited education. It makes sense to me that they believe most people can get ahead if they work hard - because, for the most part, that’s how it worked out for them. Is that “system justification”, or simply believing in the system upon the evidence of their own lives?
Locus of control is not just a belief in the head - it is a belief tendency that reflects reality and creates reality. Change the reality and the belief will shift - maybe not in lock-step but in time.
Self-serving bias: the tendency to take credit for desirable outcomes and blame factors outside one’s control for undesired outcome, e.g., attributing a job promotion to hard work but failure to get promoted to a bad boss. What accounts for this tendency? Here are four possibilities:
To simplify a whole lot, there are two schools of thought about why people do what they do. One is that people can’t help it because behavior is an outcome of things that they have no control over, like culture, childhood trauma…The other school of thought says behavior is always “on-purpose”. In other words, behavior is goal-directed - by definition. We therefore choose what we do according to the perceived payoff: what we’re trying to achieve or avoid.
I have noticed these differences in the manner of veterinarians and physicians for years. Why the difference? Is it a matter of workload and stress? Status and power? How much can’t be helped and how much is a choice? How much is related to different incentives and payment systems?
Another way of putting this: focus on the process and uncertainty spurs you on; focus on the outcome and uncertainty makes you stumble.
Studies on the effectiveness of driver safety messages found that messages that focused on “fear arousal” were more likely to be rejected, while those that focused on concrete, doable behaviors were more likely to be accepted.