Category: Psychology & Anthropology

When It’s Bad to Have Good Choices – The New Yorker

Why are well-fed people in affluent countries often unhappy and anxious?

The choices between those objects that they valued most highly were both the most positive and the most anxiety-filled. The more choices they had—the study was repeated with up to six items per choice—the more anxious they felt.

What changes as we move from the scarcity of wartime Warsaw to the abundance of the First World isn’t the nature of the anxiety, it’s just the nature and significance of the choice itself. In one case, it seems heart-wrenching; in the other, trivial. Our brains, though, don’t make those kinds of value judgments: to them, a difficult choice is a difficult choice. And difficult choices mean anxiety.

Source: When It’s Bad to Have Good Choices – The New Yorker

 

Having good choices might foster critical thinking, self-reliance, etc. But that doesn’t stop it the experience from being stressful or making you anxious, possibly even for a long time after you’ve made the decision, which IMHO was the takeaway from the article — that the more impactful and closer a choice is, the harder it is and the more anxious that makes people. Needing to pick between job offers in your home town, or far away in the big city can still make you anxious, but it is still good to have that choice. And nowhere in the article do I see support for the state/government to step in to artificially reduce choice.

How many people agonize over where to go to college, what to major in, or whether or not to get engaged/married to their current significant other, or regret such decisions years or decades later *because they changed their mind about being able to do better*? IMHO, they aren’t upset that they made an objectively bad choice (although I’m sure that happens too), but that they feel they made a relatively bad choice given that they now know all the details and specifics of their actual choice and only know the highlights of the foregone choice.

How We All Miss the Point on School Shootings

The real problem with school shootings is right in front of us, yet we choose to ignore it.

each time, as a culture, we work ourselves into a frenzy debating the angry exterior message, while ignoring the interior life and context of each killer. We miss the point entirely.

These shooters know what they are doing. They’re not “crazy.” They don’t just “snap.” Most of them spend months or years planning their massacres. … It’s all very conscious and deliberate. And it works. … as Eric Harris pointed out in his journal, it’s not about the guns. It’s about the television. The films. The fame.

Gun control gets the headlines. Mental health care gets the headlines. Violence and video games and misogyny and internet forums and atheism — the list is endless at this point.

Here’s what doesn’t get the headlines: Empathy. Listening to those around you. Even if you don’t like them very much. We have come to live in a culture where it’s taboo or unacceptable to simply check in with people emotionally and offer some empathy and understanding.

And while we’re all fighting over whose pet cause is more right and more true and more noble, there’s likely another young man out there, maybe suicidally depressed, maybe paranoid and delusional, maybe a psychopath, and he’s researching guns and bombs and mapping out schools and recording videos and thinking every day about the anger and hate he feels for this world.

And no one is paying attention to him.

Source: How We All Miss the Point on School Shootings

Raising a Moral Child – The New York Times

The tactics are different from those used for encouraging achievement.

Despite the significance that it holds in our lives, teaching children to care about others is no simple task.

Genetic twin studies suggest that anywhere from a quarter to more than half of our propensity to be giving and caring is inherited. That leaves a lot of room for nurture, and the evidence on how parents raise kind and compassionate children flies in the face of what many of even the most well-intentioned parents do in praising good behavior, responding to bad behavior, and communicating their values.

Praising their character helped them internalize it as part of their identities. The children learned who they were from observing their own actions: I am a helpful person.

Tying generosity to character appears to matter most around age 8, when children may be starting to crystallize notions of identity.

If we want our children to care about others, we need to teach them to feel guilt rather than shame when they misbehave. … The most effective response to bad behavior is to express disappointment. … The beauty of expressing disappointment is that it communicates disapproval of the bad behavior, coupled with high expectations and the potential for improvement

Children learn generosity not by listening to what their role models say, but by observing what they do.

People often believe that character causes action, but when it comes to producing moral children, we need to remember that action also shapes character.

Source: Raising a Moral Child – The New York Times

What You Can’t Say

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They’re just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they’re much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.

What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That’s what I want to study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can’t say, in any era.

obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How can we find these too?

Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not.
…
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label—”sexist”, for example—and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?

Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won’t really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They’ll be things you’ve already noticed but didn’t let yourself think.

I suspect the only taboos that are more than taboos are the ones that are universal, or nearly so. Murder for example.

How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own time.

Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there’s something we can’t say, it’s often because some group doesn’t want us to. The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous.

When you find something you can’t say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don’t say it. Or at least, pick your battles. … I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. … The problem is, there are so many things you can’t say. If you said them all you’d have no time left for your real work.

A lot of the questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. There is no prize for getting the answer quickly.

It’s not just the mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance.

Source: What You Can’t Say by Paul Graham

The psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity – Salon.com

From slavery to genocide, society has shown a terrifying ability to disregard the personhood of others. Here’s why

For psychologists, distance is not just physical space. It is also psychological space, the degree to which you feel closely connected to someone else. … Distance keeps your sixth sense disengaged for at least two reasons. First, your ability to understand the minds of others can be triggered by your physical senses. When you’re too far away in physical space, those triggers do not get pulled. Second, your ability to understand the minds of others is also engaged by your cognitive inferences. Too far away in psychological space—too different, too foreign, too other—and those triggers, again, do not get pulled.

The mistake that can arise when you fail to engage with the minds of others is that you may come to think of them as relatively mindless. That is, you may come to think that these others have less going on between their ears than, say, you do. … the most basic and fundamental experience you have of your own mind: your sense of free will. … Are others as free to choose as you are, or do they have less free will? Are they more beholden to their circumstances or their environments or their rigid ideologies than you are?

When the mind of another person looks relatively dim because you are not engaged with it directly, it does not mean that the other person’s mind is actually dimmer. … More subtle versions of that disengagement are common, and the mistakes they create can lead us to be less wise about the minds of others than we could be.

Source: The psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity – Salon.com