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charlottedonoho

Researchers Link Feelings Of Disgust And Ethical Behavior : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...f-disgust-and-ethical-behavior

ethics emotion behavior

shared by charlottedonoho on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Next, we examine what happens when you feel disgusted. Maybe you've come across rotting food or a bathroom that's dirty. Well, there's new research exploring how that kind of experience affects the ethical choices you might make afterward.
  • Disgust seems to make people behave in more unethical ways, Steve. This is research by Karen Winterich, Vikas Mittal and Andrea Morales. They conducted a series of experiments. In one of them, they had volunteers view a scene from the movie "Trainspotting," and the movie showed a disgustingly dirty toilet. Other volunteers watched a documentary about a coral reef. The researchers find that volunteers who watched the disgusting scene are more likely to cheat a partner in a game they play right afterwards.
  • And they're arguing that the feeling of disgust triggers feelings of self-preservation - wanting to protect yourself from the thing that's disgusting. And the researchers are speculating that these feelings of self-preservation translate more generally into feelings of selfishness, of looking out for yourself and this produces a willingness to cheat.
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  • But it's another example of this mountain of studies that suggest that the social context in the social world changes our behavior even when we're not aware of it.
Javier E

About Face: Emotions and Facial Expressions May Not Be Directly Related | Boston Magazine - 0 views

www.bostonmagazine.com/...print

emotion research science social science methods

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Ekman had traveled the globe with photographs that showed faces experiencing six basic emotions—happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise. Everywhere he went, from Japan to Brazil to the remotest village of Papua New Guinea, he asked subjects to look at those faces and then to identify the emotions they saw on them. To do so, they had to pick from a set list of options presented to them by Ekman. The results were impressive. Everybody, it turned out, even preliterate Fore tribesmen in New Guinea who’d never seen a foreigner before in their lives, matched the same emotions to the same faces. Darwin, it seemed, had been right.
  • Ekman’s findings energized the previously marginal field of emotion science. Suddenly, researchers had an objective way to measure and compare human emotions—by reading the universal language of feeling written on the face. In the years that followed, Ekman would develop this idea, arguing that each emotion is like a reflex, with its own circuit in the brain and its own unique pattern of effects on the face and the body. He and his peers came to refer to it as the Basic Emotion model—and it had significant practical applications
  • What if he’s wrong?
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  • Barrett is a professor of psychology at Northeastern
  • her research has led her to conclude that each of us constructs them in our own individual ways, from a diversity of sources: our internal sensations, our reactions to the environments we live in, our ever-evolving bodies of experience and learning, our cultures.
  • if Barrett is correct, we’ll need to rethink how we interpret mental illness, how we understand the mind and self, and even what psychology as a whole should become in the 21st century.
  • The problem was the options that Ekman had given his subjects when asking them to identify the emotions shown on the faces they were presented with. Those options, Barrett discovered, had limited the ways in which people allowed themselves to think. Barrett explained the problem to me this way: “I can break that experiment really easily, just by removing the words. I can just show you a face and ask how this person feels. Or I can show you two faces, two scowling faces, and I can say, ‘Do these people feel the same thing?’ And agreement drops into the toilet.”
  • Just as that first picture of the bee actually wasn’t a picture of a bee for me until I taught myself that it was, my emotions aren’t actually emotions until I’ve taught myself to think of them that way. Without that, I have only a meaningless mishmash of information about what I’m feeling.
  • emotion isn’t a simple reflex or a bodily state that’s hard-wired into our DNA, and it’s certainly not universally expressed. It’s a contingent act of perception that makes sense of the information coming in from the world around you, how your body is feeling in the moment, and everything you’ve ever been taught to understand as emotion. Culture to culture, person to person even, it’s never quite the same. What’s felt as sadness in one person might as easily be felt as weariness in another, or frustration in someone else.
  • The brain, it turns out, doesn’t consciously process every single piece of information that comes its way. Think of how impossibly distracting the regular act of blinking would be if it did. Instead, it pays attention to what you need to pay attention to, then raids your memory stores to fill in the blanks.
  • In many quarters, Barrett was angrily attacked for her ideas, and she’s been the subject of criticism ever since. “I think Lisa does a disservice to the actual empirical progress that we’re making,” says Dacher Keltner, a Berkeley psychologist
  • Keltner told me that he himself has coded thousands of facial expressions using Ekman’s system, and the results are strikingly consistent: Certain face-emotion combinations recur regularly, and others never occur. “That tells me, ‘Wow, this approach to distinct emotions has real power,’” he says.
  • Ekman reached the peak of his fame in the years following 2001. That’s the year the American Psychological Association named him one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. The next year, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article about him in the New Yorker, and in 2003 he began working pro bono for the TSA. A year later, riding the updraft of success, he left his university post and started the Paul Ekman Group,
  • a small research team to visit the isolated Himba tribe in Namibia, in southern Africa. The plan was this: The team, led by Maria Gendron, would do a study similar to Ekman’s original cross-cultural one, but without providing any of the special words or context-heavy stories that Ekman had used to guide his subjects’ answers. Barrett’s researchers would simply hand a jumbled pile of different expressions (happy, sad, fearful, angry, disgusted, and neutral) to their subjects, and would ask them to sort them into six piles. If emotional expressions are indeed universal, they reasoned, then the Himba would put all low-browed, tight-lipped expressions into an anger pile, all wrinkled-nose faces into a disgust pile, and so on.
  • It didn’t happen that way. The Himba sorted some of the faces in ways that aligned with Ekman’s theory: smiling faces went into one pile, wide-eyed fearful faces went into another, and affectless faces went mostly into a third. But in the other three piles, the Himba mixed up angry scowls, disgusted grimaces, and sad frowns. Without any suggestive context, of the kind that Ekman had originally provided, they simply didn’t recognize the differences that leap out so naturally to Westerners.
  • “What we’re trying to do,” she told me, “is to just get people to pay attention to the fact that there’s a mountain of evidence that does not support the idea that facial expressions are universally recognized as emotional expressions.” That’s the crucial point, of course, because if we acknowledge that, then the entire edifice that Paul Ekman and others have been constructing for the past half-century comes tumbling down. And all sorts of things that we take for granted today—how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others, how we practice psychology
  • Barrett’s theory is still only in its infancy. But other researchers are beginning to take up her ideas, sometimes in part, sometimes in full, and where the science will take us as it expands is impossible to predict. It’s even possible that Barrett will turn out to be wrong, as she herself acknowledges. “Every scientist has to face that,” she says. Still, if she is right, then perhaps the most important change we’ll need to make is in our own heads. If our emotions are not universal physiological responses but concepts we’ve constructed from various biological signals and stashed memories, then perhaps we can exercise more control over our emotional lives than we’ve assumed.
  • “Every experience you have now is seeding your experience for the future,” Barrett told me. “Knowing that, would you choose to do what you’re doing now?” She paused a beat and looked me in the eye. “Well? Would you? You are the architect of your own experience.”
Javier E

The Disgust Election - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-disgust-election.html

election financing rich corruption supreme court oligarchy campaign politics

shared by Javier E on 25 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • I would like for the most influential swing voter on the Supreme Court to step away from his legal aerie, and wade through some of the muck that he and four fellow justices have given us with the 2014 campaign.
  • How did we lose our democracy? Slowly at first, and then all at once. This fall, voters are more disgusted, more bored and more cynical about the midterm elections than at any time in at least two decades.
  • beyond disdain for this singular crop of do-nothings, the revulsion is generated by a sense that average people have lost control of one of the last things that citizens should be able to control — the election itself.
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  • You can trace the Great Breach to Justice Kennedy’s words in the 2010 Citizens United case, which gave wealthy, secret donors unlimited power to manipulate American elections. The decision legalized large-scale bribery — O.K., influence buying — and ensured that we would never know exactly who was purchasing certain politicians.
  • Kennedy famously predicted the opposite. He wrote that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That’s the money quote — one of the great wish-projections in court history. But Kennedy also envisioned a new day, whereby there would be real-time disclosure of the big financial forces he unleashed across the land.In his make-believe, post-Citizens United world, voters “can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”
  • At the same time that this court has handed over elections to people who already have enormous power, they’ve given approval to efforts to keep the powerless from voting. In Texas, Republicans have passed a selective voter ID bill that could keep upward of 600,000 citizens — students, Native Americans in federally recognized tribes, the elderly — from having a say in this election.
  • you can’t argue with the corrosive and dispiriting effect, on the rest of us, of campaigns controlled by the rich, the secret, the few.
  • This year, the Koch brothers and their extensions — just to name one lonely voice in the public realm — have operations in at least 35 states, and will spend somewhere north of $120 million to ensure a Congress that will do their bidding. Spending by outside groups has gone to $1 billion in 2012 from $52 million in 2000.
  • just the opposite has happened. The big money headed for the shadows. As my colleague Nicholas Confessore documented earlier this month, more than half the ads aired by outside groups during this campaign have come from secret donors. Oligarchs hiding behind front groups — Citizens for Fluffy Pillows — are pulling the levers of the 2014 campaign, and overwhelmingly aiding Republicans.
  • What’s the big deal? Well, you can vote in Texas with a concealed handgun ID, but not one from a four-year college. The new voter suppression measure, allowed to go ahead in an unsigned order by the court last Saturday, “is a purposefully discriminating law,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent, “one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hun
  • With the 2010 case, the court handed control of elections over to dark money interests who answer to nobody. And in the Texas case, the court has ensured that it will be more difficult for voters without money or influence to use the one tool they have.
Emily Horwitz

Mining Books To Map Emotions Through A Century : Shots - Health News : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...map-emotions-through-a-century

language culture emotion anthropology

shared by Emily Horwitz on 02 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Were people happier in the 1950s than they are today? Or were they more frustrated, repressed and sad? To find out, you'd have to compare the emotions of one generation to another. British anthropologists think they may have found the answer — embedded in literature.
  • This effort began simply with lists of "emotion" words: 146 different words that connote anger; 92 words for fear; 224 for joy; 115 for sadness; 30 for disgust; and 41 words for surprise. All were from standardized word lists used in linguistic research.
  • We didn't really expect to find anything," he says. "We were just curious. We really expected the use of emotion words to be constant through time." Instead, in the study they published in the journal PLOS ONE, the anthropologists found very distinct peaks and valleys, Bently says.
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  • "The twenties were the highest peak of joy-related words that we see," he says. "They really were roaring." But then there came 1941, which, of course, marked the beginning of America's entry into World War II. It doesn't take a historian to see that peaks and valleys like these roughly mirror the major economic and social events of the century. "In 1941, sadness is at its peak," Bently says.
  • They weren't just novels or books about current events, Bentley says. Many were books without clear emotional content — technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or automotive repair guides. "It's not like the change in emotion is because people are writing about the Depression, and people are writing about the war," he says. "There might be a little bit of that, but this is just, kind of, averaged over all books and it's just kind of creeping in."
  • Generally speaking the usage of these commonly known emotion words has been in decline over the 20th century," Bentley says. We used words that expressed our emotions less in the year 2000 than we did 100 years earlier — words about sadness, and joy, and anger, and disgust and surprise. In fact, there is only one exception that Bentley and his colleagues found: fear. "The fear-related words start to increase just before the 1980s," he says.
  • For psychologists, he says, there are only a handful of ways to try to understand what is actually going on with somebody emotionally. "One is what a person says," Pennebaker explains, "kind of the 'self report' of emotion. Another might be the physiological links, and the third is what slips out when they're talking to other people, when they're writing a book or something like that."
  • Emily Horwitz on 02 Apr 13
     
    Researchers have found a connection between economic troubles and the emotions used in various genres of literature over time. What I found most interesting was that, even in non-fiction, technical literature, the researchers still found differences in words used that had a certain emotional connotation, depending on the emotions of the time period. It seems that these anthropologists are finding a link between the way our culture and emotion influences our language.
Javier E

Hold The Mayo « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...hold-the-mayo

emotion research disgust cultural in-group

shared by Javier E on 03 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • an idea upon which revulsion scholars generally agree: Disgust is largely a cultural phenomenon. Infants don’t seem to experience it. Tiny children will tolerate unholy decay odors, and experiments show many will happily eat imitation feces (made with stinky cheese) or quaff glasses of juice in which (sterilized) grasshoppers bob like ice cubes. From centipedes to boogers, the grossout response is a learned one. Its latent purpose is often to distinguish friend from foe, and pass judgment on the habits of others.
knudsenlu

Huge MIT Study of 'Fake News': Falsehoods Win on Twitter - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...555104

social media fake news us trump culture internet research

shared by knudsenlu on 10 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” Jonathan Swift once wrote.It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study published Thursday in Science.
  • By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories.
  • “It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. “And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature.”
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  • A false story is much more likely to go viral than a real story, the authors find. A false story reaches 1,500 people six times quicker, on average, than a true story does.
  • “In short, I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt the study’s results,” said Rebekah Tromble, a professor of political science at Leiden University in the Netherlands, in an email.
  • It’s a question that can have life-or-death consequences.“[Fake news] has become a white-hot political and, really, cultural topic, but the trigger for us was personal events that hit Boston five years ago,” said Deb Roy, a media scientist at MIT and one of the authors of the new study.
  • Ultimately, they found about 126,000 tweets, which, together, had been retweeted more than 4.5 million times. Some linked to “fake” stories hosted on other websites. Some started rumors themselves, either in the text of a tweet or in an attached image. (The team used a special program that could search for words contained within static tweet images.) And some contained true information or linked to it elsewhere.
  • Tweet A and Tweet B both have the same size audience, but Tweet B has more “depth,” to use Vosoughi’s term. It chained together retweets, going viral in a way that Tweet A never did. “It could reach 1,000 retweets, but it has a very different shape,” he said.Here’s the thing: Fake news dominates according to both metrics. It consistently reaches a larger audience, and it tunnels much deeper into social networks than real news does. The authors found that accurate news wasn’t able to chain together more than 10 retweets. Fake news could put together a retweet chain 19 links long—and do it 10 times as fast as accurate news put together its measly 10 retweets.
  • What does this look like in real life? Take two examples from the last presidential election. In August 2015, a rumor circulated on social media that Donald Trump had let a sick child use his plane to get urgent medical care. Snopes confirmed almost all of the tale as true. But according to the team’s estimates, only about 1,300 people shared or retweeted the story.
  • Why does falsehood do so well? The MIT team settled on two hypotheses.First, fake news seems to be more “novel” than real news. Falsehoods are often notably different from the all the tweets that have appeared in a user’s timeline 60 days prior to their retweeting them, the team found.Second, fake news evokes much more emotion than the average tweet. The researchers created a database of the words that Twitter users used to reply to the 126,000 contested tweets, then analyzed it with a state-of-the-art sentiment-analysis tool. Fake tweets tended to elicit words associated with surprise and disgust, while accurate tweets summoned words associated with sadness and trust, they found.
  • It suggests—to me, at least, a Twitter user since 2007, and someone who got his start in journalism because of the social network—that social-media platforms do not encourage the kind of behavior that anchors a democratic government. On platforms where every user is at once a reader, a writer, and a publisher, falsehoods are too seductive not to succeed: The thrill of novelty is too alluring, the titillation of disgust too difficult to transcend. After a long and aggravating day, even the most staid user might find themselves lunging for the politically advantageous rumor. Amid an anxious election season, even the most public-minded user might subvert their higher interest to win an argument.
Javier E

The Ugly Honesty of Elon Musk's Twitter Rebrand - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...674875

internet adolescent immature juvenile sexism bias psychology social media

shared by Javier E on 08 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • Sexual desire and frustration, familiar feelings for the outcast teenage nerd, pervade the social internet. S3xy-ness is everywhere. Posts by women are dismayingly likely to produce advances, or threats, from creepers on all platforms; at the same time, sex appeal is a pillar for the influencer economy, or else a viable and even noble way to win financial independence. The internet is for porn, as the song goes.
  • In all these ways, online life today descends from where it started, as a safe harbor for the computer nerds who made it. They were socially awkward, concerned with machines instead of people, and devoted to the fantasy of converting their impotence into power.
  • When that conversion was achieved, and the nerds took over the world, they adopted the bravado of the jocks they once despised. (Zuck-Musk cage match, anyone?) But they didn’t stop being nerds. We, the public, never agreed to adopt their worldview as the basis for political, social, or aesthetic life. We got it nevertheless.
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  • I’m kind of tired of pretending that the stench does not exist, as if doing otherwise would be tantamount to expressing prejudice against neurodivergence. This is a bad culture, and it always has been.
  • If the X rebrand disgusts you—if, like me, you’ve been made a little queasy by having the new logo thrust upon your phone via automatic update—that feeling is about more than Musk alone. He has merely surfaced what has been there all along. The internet is magical and empowering. The internet is childish and disgusting.
  • Musk’s obsession with X as a brand, and his childish desire to broadcast that obsession from the rooftops in hoggish, bright pulsations, calls attention to this baggage. It reminds us that the world’s richest man is a computer geek, but one with enormous power instead of none
  • It calls attention to the putrid smell that suffuses the history of the internet
Javier E

Opinion | Do You Live in a 'Tight' State or a 'Loose' One? Turns Out It Matters Quite a... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ed-blue-tight-loose-state.html

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.
  • In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”
  • titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.
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  • Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”
  • The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina
  • states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.
  • Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters).
  • “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned
  • The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.
  • The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”
  • Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.
  • In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.
  • The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France,
  • cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”
  • The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive
  • My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.
  • Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side.
  • Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.
  • If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?
  • Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?
  • As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals
  • She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals
  • Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently.
  • Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.
  • Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values
  • conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”
  • Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right.
  • For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).
  • Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.
  • We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity)
  • Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.
  • A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.
  • What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them
  • Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.
  • Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:
  • I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).
  • Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world
  • Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.
  • I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?
  • There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanatio
  • I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”
  • Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles
  • Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:
  • t’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier
  • They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.
  • Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.
  • Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?
  • It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”
  • While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.
  • there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:
  • While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments
  • For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.
  • Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.
  • We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”
  • In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”
  • Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.
  • “political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective
  • In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:
  • society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.
  • The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”
  • The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.
  • or each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative positio
  • Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarizatio
  • Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.
  • Describing their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.
  • The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer sugges
  • — or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.
Javier E

Jonathan Haidt: Reasons Do Matter - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...er-when-intuitions-dont-object

moral reasoning Haidt intuition emotion reason philosophers

shared by Javier E on 10 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • I never said that reason plays no role in judgment. Rather, I urged that we be realistic about reasoning and recognize that reasons persuade others on moral and political issues only under very special circumstances.
  • two basic kinds of cognitive events are “seeing-that” and “reasoning-why.” (These terms correspond roughly to what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and others call “System 1” and “System 2” and that I call the “elephant” and the “rider.”)
  • We effortlessly and intuitively “see that” something is true, and then we work to find justifications, or “reasons why,” which we can give to others.  Both processes are crucial for understanding belief and persuasion. Both are needed for the kind of democratic deliberation that Lynch (and I) want to promote.
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  • According to Margolis, people don’t change their minds unless they move along the horizontal dimension. Intuition is what most matters for belief. Yet a moral argument generally consists of round after round of reasoning. Each person tries to pull the other along the vertical dimension.
  • if your opponent succeeds in defeating your reasons, you are unlikely to change your judgment. You’ve been dragged into the upper-left quadrant, but you still feel, intuitively, that it’s wrong
  • This, I suggest, is how moral arguments proceed when people have strong intuitions anchoring their beliefs. And intuitions are rarely stronger than when they are part of our partisan identities. So I’m not saying that reasons “play no role in moral judgment.” In fact, four of the six links in my Social Intuitionist Model are reasoning links. Most of what’s going on during an argu
  • ment is reasoning
  • I’m saying that reason is far less powerful than intuition, so if you’re arguing (or deliberating) with a partner who lives on the other side of the political spectrum from you, and you approach issues such as abortion, gay marriage or income inequality with powerfully different intuitive reactions, you are unlikely to effect any persuasion no matter how good your arguments and no matter how much time you give your opponent to reflect upon your logic.
  • as an intuitionist, I see hope in an approach to deliberative democracy that uses social psychology to calm the passions and fears that make horizontal movement so difficult.
  • One of the issues I am most passionate about is political civility. I co-run a site at www.CivilPolitics.org where we define civility as “the ability to disagree with others while respecting their sincerity and decency.” We explain our goals like this: “We believe this ability [civility] is best fostered by indirect methods (changing contexts, payoffs and institutions) rather than by direct methods (such as pleading with people to be more civil, or asking people to sign civility pledges).” In other words, we hope to open up space for civil disagreement by creating contexts in which elephants (automatic processes and intuitions) are calmer, rather than by asking riders (controlled processes, including reasoning) to try harder.
  • We are particularly interested in organizations that try to create a sense of community and camaraderie as a precondition for political discussions.
  • if you want to persuade someone, talk to the elephant first. Trigger the right intuitions first.
  • This is why there has been such rapid movement on gay marriage and gay rights. It’s not because good arguments have suddenly appeared, which nobody thought of in the 1990s
  • younger people, who grew up knowing gay people and seeing gay couples on television, have no such disgust. For them, the arguments are much more persuasive.
  • I love Aristotle’s emphasis on habit — and I had a long section on virtue ethics in Chapter 6 that got cut at the last minute, but which I have just now posted online here
  • philosophers have the best norms for good thinking that I have ever encountered. When my work is critiqued by a philosopher I can be certain that he or she has read me carefully, including the footnotes, and will not turn me into a straw man. More than any other subculture I know, the philosophical community embodies the kinds of normative pressures for reason-giving and responsiveness to reasons that Allan Gibbard describes in “Wise Choices, Apt Feelings.”
sissij

Emotions | Being Human - 2 views

www.beinghuman.org/emotions

emotions human science research psychology

shared by sissij on 26 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • They come and go, changing like the weather in April: sunny, rainy, stormy, mild or thunderous. Usually we find a reason why we’re happy or sad, embarrassed, or proud.
  • Although most people feel that emotions are one of the most personal, intimate, private expressions, an evolutionary understanding implies that they are, instead, impersonal mechanisms that we all share.
  • The basic emotions—fear, sorrow, disgust, anger, and joy—evolved as mechanisms to instigate behaviors appropriate to the environments of our distant ancestors.
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  • Guilt signals that we’ve violated morals we believe in; embarrassment shows that we’ve made a fool out of ourselves
  • We evolved lo earn from emotions and they shape our behavior continually. Fundamentally we try to avoid unpleasant emotions and experience pleasant ones because they indicate situations that are either beneficial or harmful for us.
  • sissij on 26 Nov 16
     
    I found this article very interesting because it shows me another aspect of emotion, as a very impersonal shared knowledge that's developed by the logic of evolution. I think there are some similarities between emotions and languages as they both shape our behavior continually, and also emotion can be used a tool of communication in a way just like language. Actually, I think emotions serve as the very primitive form of communication in the early phase of human. --Sissi (11/26/2016)
sandrine_h

A Psychologist Analyzes Donald Trump's Personality - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...480771

shared by sandrine_h on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • From unsympathetic journalists to political rivals, Trump calls his opponents “disgusting” and writes them off as “losers.” By the standards of reality TV, Trump’s disagreeableness may not be so shocking. But political candidates who want people to vote for them rarely behave like this.
  • Trump seems capable of a similar toughness and strategic pragmatism, although the cool rationality does not always seem to fit, probably because Trump’s disagreeableness appears so strongly motivated by anger.
  • Research shows that people low in agreeableness are typically viewed as untrustworthy. Dishonesty and deceit brought down Nixon and damaged the institution of the presidency. It is generally believed today that all politicians lie, or at least dissemble, but Trump appears extreme in this regard. Assessing the truthfulness of the 2016 candidates’ campaign statements, PolitiFact recently calculated that only 2 percent of the claims made by Trump are true, 7 percent are mostly true, 15 percent are half true, 15 percent are mostly false, 42 percent are false, and 18 percent are “pants on fire.” Adding up the last three numbers (from mostly false to flagrantly so), Trump scores 75 percent. The corresponding figures for Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, respectively, are 66, 32, 31, and 29 percent.
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  • Combined with a gift for humor, anger lies at the heart of Trump’s charisma.
Javier E

The Evolving Teenage Brain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-evolving-teenage-brain

adolescence brain science

shared by Javier E on 04 May 12 - Cached
  • Why do teenagers “behave with such vexing inconsistency: beguiling at breakfast, disgusting at dinner; masterful on Monday, sleepwalking on Saturday?” David Dobbs has compiled the available scientific answers to that question masterfully in “Teenage Brains” for the May issue of National Geographic. Teenage brains, he says, are effectively bringing a new operating system online.
  • “as we move through adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive remodeling, resembling a network and wiring upgrade.”
  • This period of development, he writes, is also adaptive: it is perfect for “the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.”
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  • Teenagers take more risks, this new view of the research shows, because risk-taking in adolescence has historically given them an adaptive edge. “Succeeding often requires moving out of the home and into less secure situations.” They prefer the company of other teenagers because they are designed to “invest in the future rather than the past.” And they perceive a social crisis as a threat to their very existence because, on a neural level, “our brains react to peer exclusion much as they respond to threats to physical health or food supply.”
  • Studies show that when parents engage and guide their teens  with a light but steady hand, staying connected but allowing independence, their kids generally do much better in life. Adolescents want to learn primarily, but not entirely, from their friends. At some level and at some times (and it’s the parent’s job to spot when), the teen  recognizes that the parent can offer certain kernels of wisdom — knowledge valued not because it comes from parental authority, but because it comes from the parent’s own struggles to learn how the world turns.
Keiko E

How Warm Temperatures Affect Us - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4520804576349213528554824.html

warmth perception emotion

shared by Keiko E on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Could a few feet of the cold stuff really have such a fundamental effect on beliefs and behavior? Absolutely, according to recent studies on how temperature influences us at an unconscious level. Researchers affiliated with the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia Business School measured the public's changing attitudes about climate change
  • Those who felt that the current day was warmer than usual for the time of year were more likely to believe in and worry about global warming than those who thought it was cooler outside. They were also more likely to donate the money they earned from taking the survey to a charity that did work on climate change.
  • The researchers call this bias "attribute substitution," meaning that we take a simple judgment, like noting a warm or cold day, and apply it to a larger, more complex one, like whether the planet is headed for a meltdown
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  • Physical warmth activates circuits in the brain associated with feelings of psychological warmth. The insular cortex, or insula, plays a critical role in this crossover between the outside world and our experience of it. This peach-sized region helps us to perceive whether a sensation is hot or cold, pleasurable or painful. It is activated when we crave chocolate, fall in love or get disgusted. The insula also guides us on social matters: whether to trust or feel guilty, to empathize or be embarrassed. People who meditate, according to some studies, have a thicker insula.
  • As it turns out, the insula's poetic merging of the physical and emotional helps to explain much of our unconscious behavior. People who are socially rejected—given the cold shoulder—get chills and crave warm food such as soup.
  • Warm springtime conditions are related to a better mood and expanded memory, but both take a plunge in the summer heat. Extreme temperatures make people hostile and aggressive, and violent crimes occur more often in the hotter months. Drivers honk more in heat waves. When you're hot and tired, you're more likely to interpret another person's neutral expression negatively.
  • our perception of reality still relies on sensory experience. Though we may wish for it to be otherwise, our minds cannot be separated from our bodies. And our bodies depend on the environment—what we encounter here on planet Earth
demetriar

The Science of Emotion in Marketing: How Our Brains Decide What to Share and ... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...e-of-emotion-in_b_5489567.html

science emotion marketing brain science behavior technology

shared by demetriar on 08 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A new study says we're really only capable of four "basic" emotions: happy, sad, afraid/surprised, and angry/disgusted.
  • He found that an article was more likely to become viral the more positive it was.
  • the emotions of sadness and sorrow light up many of the same regions of the brain as happiness.
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  • . Later, those who produced the most oxytocin were the most likely to give money to others they couldn't see.
  • "Our results show why puppies and babies are in toilet paper commercials," Zak said. "This research suggests that advertisers use images that cause our brains to release oxytocin to build trust in a product or brand, and hence increase sales."
  • A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research demonstrated that consumers who experienced fear while watching a film felt a greater affiliation with a present brand than those who watched films evoking other emotions, like happiness, sadness or excitement.
  • The rude comments made participants dig in on their stance
  • That emotions are critical -- maybe even more than previously thought -- to marketing.
  • In an analysis of the IPA dataBANK, which contains 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns, campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31 percent versus 16 percent) as those with only rational content (and did a little better than those that mixed emotional and rational content).
  • The emotional brain processes sensory information in one fifth of the time our cognitive brain takes to assimilate the same input
  • we're not just sharing the object, but we're sharing in the emotional response it creates."
jongardner04

Study investigates why sadness is the longest-lasting emotion - Medical News Today - 0 views

www.medicalnewstoday.com/...284741.php

emotion

shared by jongardner04 on 15 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • ut of 27 emotions in total, the researchers found that sadness was the longest-lasting emotion; shame, surprise, fear, disgust, boredom, being touched, irritation and relief, however, were the shortest-lasting emotions.
  • The team was surprised to find that boredom was one of the shortest emotions; typically time seems to pass slowly when we are bored. However, they say their results show that an episode of boredom does not actually last very long.
  • jongardner04 on 15 Jan 15
     
    Talks about emotions and investigates why sadness is the longest lasting emotion
Emilio Ergueta

Nietzsche on Love | Issue 104 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/...Nietzsche_on_Love

nietzsche philosophy psychology gender love

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 27 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • What could Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) have to teach us about love? More than we might suppose.
  • Even during these times, between physical suffering and intense periods of writing, he pursued the company of learned women. Moreover, Nietzsche grew up in a family of women, turned to women for friendship, and witnessed his friends courtin
  • By calling our attention to the base, vulgar and selfish qualities of (heterosexual) erotic or sexual love, Nietzsche aims to strip love of its privileged status and demonstrate that what we conceive to be its opposites, such as egoism and greed, are in many instances inextricably bound up in the experience of love.
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  • In doing so, Nietzsche disassociates love from its other-worldly Christian-Platonic heritage, and so asserts his ethical claims concerning the value of the Earth over the other-worldly, and the truth of the body over the sacred.
  • Nietzsche speaks critically about the possessive or tyrannical qualities of masculine love alongside its fictionalising tendencies, stating that the natural functions of a woman’s body disgust men because they prevent him having complete access to her as a possession; they also encroach upon the conceptual perfection of love. He writes, “‘The human being under the skin’ is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable, a blasphemy against God and love.”
  • In other words, the experiences of both greed and love are the same drive or instinct, but depending upon the level of satisfaction one has achieved, this drive will be alternatively named ‘greed’ or ‘love’: satisfied people who feel their possessions (their lover for example) threatened by others will name other’s instinct for gain greed or avarice, whereas those who are still searching out something new to desire will impose a positive evaluation on that instinct and call it ‘love’.
  • Nietzsche pointedly distinguishes masculine from feminine love by the notions of devotion and fidelity. Whereas women want to surrender completely to love, to approach it as a faith, “to be taken and accepted as a possession” (363), Nietzsche claims male love hinges upon the possessive thirst to acquire more from the lover, and states that men who are inclined towards complete devotion are “not men.”
  • He proposes that love is close to greed and the lust for possession. Love is an instinctual force related to our biological and cultural drives, and as such, cannot be considered a moral good (GS 363).
  • In order to be successful in love, he counsels women to “simulate a lack of love” and to enact the roles that men find attractive. Nietzsche finds love comedic because it does not consist in some attempt to know the other deeply, but rather in the confirmation of male fantasies in which women perform their constructed gender roles.
  • Nietzsche’s writings on love have not surprisingly been influential on many feminist reflections on sex/gender. Although he is not making moralising claims about how one should love, his discussion of the difficult impact erotic and romantic relationships have on women, as well as his commentary on the ironies both sexes face in love, force his readers of both sexes to examine the roles that they play in love. It is difficult when reading him not to question one’s own performances in romantic relationships.
kushnerha

The Rise of Hate Search - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-rise-of-hate-search.html

new york times islamophobia terrorism language

shared by kushnerha on 13 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • after the media first reported that at least one of the shooters had a Muslim-sounding name, a disturbing number of Californians had decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them.
  • the rest of America searched for the phrase “kill Muslims” with about the same frequency that they searched for “martini recipe,” “migraine symptoms” and “Cowboys roster.”
  • People often have vicious thoughts. Sometimes they share them on Google. Do these thoughts matter?Yes. Using weekly data from 2004 to 2013, we found a direct correlation between anti-Muslim searches and anti-Muslim hate crimes.
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  • In 2014, according to the F.B.I., anti-Muslim hate crimes represented 16.3 percent of the total of 1,092 reported offenses. Anti-Semitism still led the way as a motive for hate crimes, at 58.2 percent.
  • Hate crimes may seem chaotic and unpredictable, a consequence of random neurons that happen to fire in the brains of a few angry young men. But we can explain some of the rise and fall of anti-Muslim hate crimes just based on what people are Googling about Muslims.
  • If our model is right, Islamophobia and thus anti-Muslim hate crimes are currently higher than at any time since the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
  • How can these Google searches track Islamophobia so well? Who searches for “I hate Muslims” anyway?We often think of Google as a source from which we seek information directly, on topics like the weather, who won last night’s game or how to make apple pie. But sometimes we type our uncensored thoughts into Google, without much hope that Google will be able to help us. The search window can serve as a kind of confessional.
  • It is not just that hatred against Muslims is extremely high today. It’s that it’s exceptional compared with prejudice against every other group in the United States.
  • “If someone is willing to say ‘I hate them’ or ‘they disgust me,’ we know that those emotions are as good a predictor of behavior as actual intent,” said Susan Fiske, a social psychologist at Princeton
  • Google searches seem to suffer from selection bias: Instead of asking a random sample of Americans how they feel, you just get information from those who are motivated to search. But this restriction may actually help search data predict hate crimes.
  • Google searches expressing moods, rather than looking for information, represent a tiny sample of everyone who is actually thinking those thoughts.
  • While the vast majority of Muslim Americans won’t be victims of hate crimes, few escape the “constant sense of fear and paranoia” that they or their loved ones might be next, said Rana Ibrahem
  • What about the other side of the coin — compassion and understanding? Do they stand a chance against hate?Searches for information about Islam and Muslims did rise after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Yet they rose far less than searches for hate did. “Who is Muhammad?” “what do Muslims believe?” and “what does the Quran say?” for instance, were no match for intolerance.
  • “Google searches answer a different question: What do people excited enough by an issue to comment on it think and believe about it? The answer to this question, just because it is unrepresentative of the public as a whole, may be a better bet to predict hate crimes.”
  • The search data also tells us that changes in Americans’ policy concerns have been dramatic. They happened, quite literally, within minutes of the terror attacks.Before the Paris attacks, 60 percent of Americans’ searches that took an obvious view of Syrian refugees saw them positively, asking how they could “help,” “volunteer” or “aid.” The other 40 percent were negative and mostly expressed skepticism about security. After Paris, however, the share of people opposed to refugees rose to 80 percent.
  • One idea might be to increase cultural integration. This is based on the “contact hypothesis”: If more Americans have Muslim neighbors, they will learn not to harbor irrational hate. We did not find support for this in the data — in fact, we found evidence for the opposite.
  • That’s evidence for the dominance of the “racial threat” hypothesis, which predicts that proximity breeds tension, not trust.
  • Another solution might be for leaders to talk about the importance of tolerance and the irrationality of hatred, as President Obama did in his Oval Office speech last Sunday night. He asked Americans to reject discrimination and religious tests for immigration. The reactions to his speech offer an excellent opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t work.
  • There was one line, however, that did trigger the type of response Mr. Obama might have wanted. He said, “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes and yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defense of our country.”After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after “Muslim” was not “terrorists,” “extremists” or “refugees.” It was “athletes,” followed by “soldiers.” And, in fact, “athletes” kept the top spot for a full day afterward.
  • On the whole, though, the response to the president’s speech shows that appealing to the better angels of an angry mob will most likely just backfire.
Javier E

Bile, venom and lies: How I was trolled on the Internet - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-829c-26ffb874a18d_story.html

social media misinformation bias troll hysteria epistemic

shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Thomas Jefferson often argued that an educated public was crucial for the survival of self-government
  • We now live in an age in which that education takes place mostly through relatively new platforms. Social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. — are the main mechanisms by which people receive and share facts, ideas and opinions. But what if they encourage misinformation, rumors and lies?
  • In a comprehensive new study of Facebook that analyzed posts made between 2010 and 2014, a group of scholars found that people mainly shared information that confirmed their prejudices, paying little attention to facts and veracity. (Hat tip to Cass Sunstein, the leading expert on this topic.) The result, the report says, is the “proliferation of biased narratives fomented by unsubstantiated rumors, mistrust and paranoia.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The authors specifically studied trolling — the creation of highly provocative, often false information, with the hope of spreading it widely. The report says that “many mechanisms cause false information to gain acceptance, which in turn generate false beliefs that, once adopted by an individual, are highly resistant to correction.”
  • in recent weeks I was the target of a trolling campaign and saw exactly how it works. It started when an obscure website published a post titled “CNN host Fareed Zakaria calls for jihad rape of white women.” The story claimed that in my “private blog” I had urged the use of American women as “sex slaves” to depopulate the white race. The post further claimed that on my Twitter account, I had written the following line: “Every death of a white person brings tears of joy to my eyes.”
  • Disgusting. So much so that the item would collapse from its own weightlessness, right? Wrong. Here is what happened next: Hundreds of people began linking to it, tweeting and retweeting it, and adding their comments, which are too vulgar or racist to repeat. A few ultra-right-wing websites reprinted the story as fact. With each new cycle, the levels of hysteria rose, and people started demanding that I be fired, deported or killed. For a few days, the digital intimidation veered out into the real world. Some people called my house late one night and woke up and threatened my daughters, who are 7 and 12.
  • The people spreading this story were not interested in the facts; they were interested in feeding prejudice. The original story was cleverly written to provide conspiracy theorists with enough ammunition to ignore evidence. It claimed that I had taken down the post after a few hours when I realized it “receive[d] negative attention.” So, when the occasional debunker would point out that there was no evidence of the post anywhere, it made little difference. When confronted with evidence that the story was utterly false, it only convinced many that there was a conspiracy and coverup.
  • conversations on Facebook are somewhat more civil, because people generally have to reveal their identities. But on Twitter and in other places — the online comments section of The Post, for example — people can be anonymous or have pseudonyms. And that is where bile and venom flow freely.
  • an experiment performed by two psychologists in 1970. They divided students into two groups based on their answers to a questionnaire: high prejudice and low prejudice. Each group was told to discuss controversial issues such as school busing and integrated housing. Then the questions were asked again. “The surveys revealed a striking pattern,” Kolbert noted. “Simply by talking to one another, the bigoted students had become more bigoted and the tolerant more tolerant.”
  • This “group polarization” is now taking place at hyper speed, around the world. It is how radicalization happens and extremism spreads.
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