Category Archives: Psychology

Projection or imagined telepathy?

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As pointed out by others MSNBC cropped the video of the black guy with a rifle at the Obama protest down enough to not show his skin color. Then they talked about gun owners being white racists against Obama.

I have to wonder what the basis for that belief was and why they would put effort into falsifying the evidence to fit their, obviously, false beliefs. Do they think they have some sort of telepathy such they can read the minds of others? Or is it as Say Uncle pointed out:

So, you were assigning stereotypes to a broad group of people? Supposedly trying to address bigotry in this country while being bigoted yourself seems to lessen your point. It’s OK, they’re only gun owners.

Although there are a people who believe they have telepathic powers I believe projection is far more common and all the evidence appears to fit that diagnosis.

Projection is very common in the anti-gun camp and it’s one of the first thing you should look for when you encounter an anti-gun person. Do they say they are afraid of what someone might do if they carried a gun while at a school/church/restaurant/wherever? The evidence is overwhelming that people with guns in those places do nearly exactly the same things that other people without guns do in those places. It’s actually their fear of what they might do if they had a gun in those places. Never mind that a police officer with a gun in the same location is just fine for nearly all of these people–disregarding the fact that police officers accidently shoot innocent people at a much higher rate than private citizens do.

So in this case the media representatives feel, without a factual basis, badly toward gun owners. They then search for something that could justify their bad feelings. Racism is an easy “hook to hang their hat on” since there once was a great deal of racism against people of color in this country and President Obama has the necessary pigmentation to be a target of white racists. But it’s the feelings of the media that drove the conclusion that someone else must be racists rather than the evidence of racism that drove their feelings.

This can be generalized to freedom in general. People are afraid of making their own decisions and they attempt restrict others decisions via some “wiser” authority with the justification being that someone else might make a bad decision–regardless of the fact that government “one size fits all” decisions for nearly everything cost more and are less effective than private solutions. Hence because of their feelings of fear of their own decision making ability drove the demands that others not make decisions for themselves rather than actual fear of others making their own decisions.

I suppose another psychological model that could be applied is one of stress reduction. It’s more stressful to believe that you are bigoted than to falsify the evidence to indicate someone else is bigoted.

In the case of the generalized freedom issue the stress reduction model works there too. It’s impossible to predict the future in any detail so having someone else to blame for making the wrong decision relieves the stress of making the, possibly wrong, decision yourself–even if the situation of nearly everyone is worse than if they made their own decisions. It appears to be more stressful for many people to see a disparity of outcomes than for everyone to have the same bad outcome. As a friend, Susan K., told me many years ago there are people who would rather everyone earns $1.00/hour than for the minimum wage in a truly free market (no government imposed minimum wage) to be $100/hour if there were other people earning $10,000/hour. I found this hard to believe but I’m now convinced it is true as long as there is some method by which the person desiring this sort of outcome can put some sort of whitewash, such as using phrases such as “social justice”, over the ugly truth.

As a side note I’ve heard it said that Bill Gates earned, on the average, about $100/second or $360K/hour while at Microsoft. This may have contributed to the great pressure put on Microsoft by the U.S. Justice Department during the 1990s and the European Union legal action that continues to this day.

Human psychology is a strange thing. What we call rational thought and socialization is only a very thin veneer over something far, far different which it pokes its ugly head through the veneer far more frequently than we realize.

Quote of the day–Jerry M. Burger

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The conclusion is not: ‘Gosh isn’t this a horrible commentary on human nature,’ or ‘these people were so sadistic. It shows the opposite — that there are situational forces that have a much greater impact on our behavior than most people recognize.

 

Jerry M. Burger
December 20, 2008
Shocking revelation: Santa Clara University professor mirrors famous torture study
[This is a reproduction of the infamous Milgram Experiments. I must conclude that this is either a facet of human psychology or at least a facet of multiple cultures. These results have tremendous impact on everything from the Holocaust, Jonestown, and civil rights to gun confiscation. Do not count on people to “do the right thing” if they are given the option of using the excuse “I was just following orders”.–Joe]

I just love it when they write sexy stuff

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Among my daily browsing fare are articles on sex research. I love the tension between the passionate subject and the dispassionate terminology and phraseology. Example:

In addition, male preference for salivary exchange could function to introduce substances such as hormones or proteins into women’s mouths that may influence their mating psychology, and even make them more sexually receptive.

I hope it wasn’t taxpayer money dispensed as research grants to “discover” that a French kiss might make a woman “hot”–even if does provide me with considerable reading enjoyment.

Quote of the day–Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

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A firing rate of 15 to 20 percent among soldiers is like having a literacy rate of 15 to 20 percent among proofreaders.  Once those in authority realized the existence and magnitude of the problem, it was only a matter of time until they solved it.

And thus, since World War II, a new era has quietly dawned in modern warfare: an era of psychological warfare — psychological warfare conducted not upon the enemy, but upon one’s own troops.  Propaganda and various other crude forms of psychological enabling have always been present in warfare, but in the second half of this century psychology has had an impact as great as that of technology on the modern battlefield.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
From On Killing — The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill In War and Society
Page 251

Psychology of Holocaust deniers & 9/11 deniers

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I was thinking all morning about posting on this subject, then a pen pal in Israel, Howard, a marksmanship instructor for the IDF, sent me an e-mail along the same lines.  I therefore can simply post the exchange I had with him:

From: Howard in Israel
Sent: Monday, September 11, 2006 9:46 AM
To: GPOSUMMARY
Subject: Fw: Headlines and Editorials

Friends:

The other night Israeli TV news reported that a recent survey in the USA determined that a third of all Americans believe that there was US government complicity in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  I find it hard to believe.  I also find it hard to believe that a group of 75 (?) university professors say the evidence of such complicity is undeniable.

If the TV report is correct, all I can do is shake my head in disbelief.

Howard
—————————————————————————–

To which I replied:

Funny you should mention that.  I was just commenting to my wife this morning that I believed I had identified a parallel between Holocaust deniers and 9/11 deniers.  Yes, it is true that there are a number of Americans, many of them college professors and administrators, who are touting the notion that the twin towers were brought down in a “controlled demolition” and the Pentagon was hit with an American cruise missile.

My hypothesis is that, just as Holocaust deniers are the very ones who agree with the Nazi’s “Final Solution”, so too are the 9/11 deniers the very same people who hate capitalism and especially international free trade.  To put it another way, they agree with the premises of the terrorists, though their rationalizations may be slightly different.

I’m no psychologist, and I cannot begin to explain why those who most agree with the anti-Semitic premises for the Holocaust would be the ones most likely to deny that it happened, or that those who most agree that Western capitalism is the root of all evil in the world would deny that the attack on the World Trade Center was perpetrated by anti-Western, anti-capitalists, but I find this fascinating.

Lyle

————————

Update, 9/12/:

Lyle:
“Fascinating” is the politest term used so far.
Howard

————————

They just lost another soldier this morning in Gaza.  He isn’t joking at all about any of this.

The psychology of politics

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As I’ve reported before (and here) when it comes to political affiliation people don’t behave rationally. Our son James also has expressed frustration at this irrational behavior. Here is some research (via Lyle at UltiMAK) that attempts to explain why people do it:

“These sacred truths are unverifiable, and unfalsifiable, but the faithful nevertheless accept them to be unquestionable. In doing so, like assemblies of the faithful since the dawn of language, they bind themselves together for protection or common action against unbelievers and their lies.”
–Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn, p. 165-166

When people in business meet for the first time to discuss a transaction, they often exchange what I call “trust cues” in order to reduce mutual suspicion. For example, they may recite empty phrases from popular business books, such as “win-win,” “synergy,” “principles,” “customer-driven,” or “raising the bar.”

Nicholas Wade provides a readable, wide-ranging survey of the impact of recent advances in genetics on anthropology. In one chapter, he argues that the origins of what I observe in business behavior can be found in early religious rituals. Religions produce trust cues. Trust cues are necessary for large societies and trade among strangers to emerge. They serve to protect people from cheaters and liars.

What I am going to suggest in this essay is that political beliefs can serve the function of trust cues. Political beliefs may have at best a tenuous empirical basis, but they function to demonstrate one’s membership in a trusted group.

I am impressed. That helps me understand better.

It’s hopeless

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Always the optimist I sometimes I fantasize about people being rational in a political environment.  I know, rationally, that is it is irrational to expect people to be rational.  But I sometimes think that if only I can come up with the right set of facts and logic I could convince almost anyone of the truth of some things–such as gun control is wrong.  Here’s evidence that it’s hopeless:

Political bias affects brain activity, study finds
Democrats and Republicans both adept at ignoring facts, brain scans show

Updated: 6:46 p.m. ET Jan. 24, 2006

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”

And people think I’m the one with the problem because they give the way my mind works a name–they call it Asperger Syndrome (thanks Mike, that was a big help–seriously).  I’m with the Aspies that call them Neurotypical.

First we nuke Medina

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As I mentioned the other day I had dinner with a friend last week.  He commented on the insanity of Bush’s State of the Union speech if you read between the lines.  I got a comment on that post defending Bush which I didn’t bother to respond to in public.  I am in close agreement with Bush on the issue and it coming from this particular friend of mine it shouldn’t really be considered as disagreement with the “Bush Doctrine“.  My friend is well aware that he cannot claim any high ground on the issue of sanity.  His solution for winning the war on terror is a case in point:

  1. We tell the residents of Medina we are going to nuke the city in two weeks.  Anyone that believes Allah will save them or prevent it should stay.
  2. Medina is converted to glass on schedule.
  3. We tell the world that if so much as a US pizza restaurant is bombed we will nuke a city in response.  As soon as we find a piece of a turban or a scrap of their beard another city will be converted to glass ASAP and without warning.

We had enough nukes to deal with Russia so we sure as hell have enough to deal with the Arabs.

I suggested perhaps the Muslim extremist psychology might not respond in the same way that he expected.  His response was:

Their psychology has been adequate for them to survive for the last thousand years.  This is about their survival.  They will figure it out or they will cease to exist, either way we win.

His solution for dealing with the existence of Osama bin Laden is similar in that it is simple, ruthless, and nuclear.

Quote of the day–Gerald M. Weinberg

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We stand at the brink of a new age, an age made possible by the revolution that is embodied in the computer. Standing on the brink, we could totter either way to a golden age of liberty or a dark age of tyranny, either of which would surpass anything the world has ever known. Perhaps no individual’s efforts will make any difference in the result, but we must never cease trying, for then the result is sure to be tyranny.

Gerald M. Weinberg
The Psychology of Computer Programming
1971