Category: Psychology & Anthropology

Source: Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill, by Bruce Levine, PhD, 2012/02/26

In Bruce Levine’s career he as spoken with hundreds of people diagnosed with ODD & ADHD. An astonishing number of these people are also anti-authoritarians.

In graduate school, I discovered that all it took to be labeled as having “issues with authority” was to not kiss up to a director of clinical training whose personality was a combination of Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and Howard Cosell.

Many anti-authoritarians who earlier in their lives were diagnosed with mental illness tell me that once they were labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis, they got caught in a dilemma. Authoritarians, by definition, demand unquestioning obedience, and so any resistance to their diagnosis and treatment created enormous anxiety for authoritarian mental health professionals; and professionals, feeling out of control, labeled them “noncompliant with treatment,” increased the severity of their diagnosis, and jacked up their medications. This was enraging for these anti-authoritarians

Source: How the internet flips elections and alters our thoughts | Aeon Essays

The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do

Google decides which web pages to include in search results, and how to rank them.
…
That ordered list is so good, in fact, that about 50 per cent of our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed on the first page of results; few people look at other results pages, even though they often number in the thousands, which means they probably contain lots of good information.

I began to wonder whether highly ranked search results could be impacting more than consumer choices. Perhaps, I speculated, a top search result could have a small impact on people’s opinions about things.
…
The shift we had produced, which we called the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (or SEME, pronounced ‘seem’), appeared to be one of the largest behavioural effects ever discovered.

on election day in 2010, Facebook sent ‘go out and vote’ reminders to more than 60 million of its users. The reminders caused about 340,000 people to vote who otherwise would not have. … given the massive amount of information it has collected about its users, Facebook could easily send such messages only to people who support one particular party or candidate

if Google set about to fix an election, it could identify just those voters who are undecided. Then it could send customised rankings favouring one candidate to just those people

The technology that now surrounds us is not just a harmless toy; it has also made possible undetectable and untraceable manipulations of entire populations – manipulations that have no precedent in human history and that are currently well beyond the scope of existing regulations and laws.

Psychology experiments show why even the financially savvy have a hard time following sensible strategies

Source: Why Don’t People Manage Debt Better? – Scientific American Blog Network

Despite its apparent burden on families across the country, many people do not effectively manage their debt. … The most effective way to pay off debt over the long-term is to focus on the loans with the highest interest rates first. Yet evidence has shown time and again that consumers are likely to manage multiple debts in ways that cost them more over time.

Instead, an overwhelming majority of participants elected to pay off the smaller debts first.

there are a number of strategies that both individuals and institutions can take to mitigate the burden of this debt, including consolidating and refinancing their existing debts.

You don’t see it coming. You probably couldn’t if you tried. The effects of large changes in scale are frequently beyond our powers…

Both $1 million and $1 billion sound like “a lot,” so it’s not immediately clear how such changes in wealth might also change what a builder sees as a “big enough” house. Even those who understand the true scale of the chasm between those numbers intellectually don’t always “get it” viscerally. It feels like the difference between a million and a billion is closer to a factor of three than a factor of 1,000. That’s because our brain naturally works using something like a logarithmic scale, so that it can condense information like vast ranges in loudness and brightness efficiently.

Predicting the qualitative effects of quantitative changes takes more than mere genius. It takes a willingness to accept the unacceptable

Scientists often have to come up with stories to translate what they see with their instruments and equations into something they—and we—can understand.

The physicist Bartlett, concerned with resource exhaustion, came up with a story of bacteria living in a Coke bottle. Imagine putting two bacteria in a soda bottle at 11 a.m. Assume the population doubles once every minute, and that by noon, the bottle is full. What time would it be before the bacteria-land politicians noticed that the population was running out of space? The answer is 11:59. After all, at 11:59, the bottle is still half empty! And what if the enterprising bacteria decide to drill for bottles offshore, and bring back three whole new empty bottles! How much time does that give the bacteria? Two more minutes.

Stories like these have more than mere narrative power. Following the strategy of the bacteria, perhaps social media can be used as a kind of quorum sensing, crowd-sourcing perception.

Source: Why We Can’t Grasp the Scale of Climate Change, Population Growth, or Societal Tipping Points