The Art of Doublespeak: Propaganda and Mind Control

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http://www.darkmoon.me

Edward Curtin
The Unz Review
December 10, 2019

In the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain.

In a number of books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays, who developed “public relations” (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for the ruling elites. Bernays had honed his skills while working as a propagandist for the United States during World War I, and after the war he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York City.

There is a fascinating exchange at the beginning of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of Self, where Bernays, then nearly 100 years old but still very sharp, reveals his manipulative mindset and that of so many of those who have followed in his wake. He says the reason he couldn’t call his new business “propaganda” was because the Germans had given propaganda a “bad name,” and so he came up with the euphemism “public relations.” He then adds that “if you could use it [i.e. propaganda] for war, you certainly could use it for peace.” Of course, he never used PR for peace but just to manipulate public opinion (he helped engineer the CIA coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 with fake news broadcasts). He says “the Germans gave propaganda a bad name,” not Bernays and the United States with their vast campaign of lies, mainly aimed at the American people to get their support for going to a war they opposed (think weapons of mass destruction). He sounds proud of his war propaganda work that resounded to his credit since it led to support for the “war to end all wars” and subsequently to a hit movie about WWI , Yankee Doodle Dandy, made in 1942 to promote another war, since the first one somehow didn’t achieve its lofty goal.

As Bernays has said in his book Propaganda,

The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.

He was a propagandist to the end. I suspect most viewers of the film are taken in by these softly spoken words of an old man sipping a glass of wine at a dinner table with a woman who is asking him questions. I have shown this film to hundreds of students and none has noticed his legerdemain. It is an example of the sort of hocus-pocus I will be getting to shortly, the sly insertion into seemingly liberal or matter-of-fact commentary of statements that imply a different story. The placement of convincing or confusing disingenuous ingredients into a truth sandwich – for Bernays knew that the bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.

In the following years, Bernays, Lippman, and their ilk were joined by social “scientists,” psychologists, and sundry others intent on making a sham out of the idea of democracy by developing strategies and techniques for the engineering of social consensus consonant with the wishes of the ruling classes.

Their techniques of propaganda developed exponentially with the development of technology, the creation of the CIA, its infiltration of all the major media, and that agency’s courting of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called in the 1950s “the compatible left,” having already had the right in its pocket. Today most people are, as is said, “wired,” and they get their information from the electronic media that is mostly controlled by giant corporations in cahoots with government propagandists. Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks increased or decreased over your lifetime. The answer is obvious: the average people that Lippman and Bernays trashed are losing and the ruling elites are winning.

This is not just because powerful propagandists are good at controlling so-called “average” people’s thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, because they are also adept – probably more so – at confusing or directing the thinking of those who consider themselves above average, those who still might read a book or two or have the concentration to read multiple articles that offer different perspectives on a topic. This is what some call the professional and intellectual classes, perhaps 15-20 % of the population, most of whom are not the ruling elites but their employees and sometimes their mouthpieces. It is this segment of the population that considers itself “informed,” but the information they imbibe is often sprinkled with bits of misdirection, both intentional and not, that beclouds their understanding of important public matters but leaves them with the false impression that they are in the know.

Recently I have noticed a group of interconnected examples of how this group of the population that exerts influence incommensurate with their numbers has contributed to the blurring of lines between fact and fiction. Within this group there are opinion makers who are often journalists, writers, and cultural producers of some sort or other, and then the larger number of the intellectual or schooled class who follow their opinions. This second group then passes on their received opinions to those who look up to them.

There is a notorious propaganda outfit called Bellingcat, started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins, that has been funded by The Atlantic Council, a think-tank with deep ties to the U.S. government, NATO, war manufacturers, and their allies, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), another infamous U.S. front organization heavily involved in so-called color revolution regime change operations all around the world, that has just won the International Emmy Award for best documentary.

The film with the Orwellian title, Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World, received its Emmy at a recent ceremony in New York City. Bellingcat is an alleged group of amateur on-line researchers who have spent years shilling for the U.S. instigated war against the Syrian government, blaming the Douma chemical attack and others on the Assad government, and for the anti-Russian propaganda connected to, among other things, the Skripal poisoning case in England, and the downing of flight MH17 plane in Ukraine. It has been lauded by the corporate mainstream media in the west. Its support for the equally fraudulent White Helmets (also funded by the US and the UK) in Syria has also been praised by the western corporate media while being dissected as propaganda by many excellent independent journalists such as Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Catte Black, among others. It’s had its work skewered by the likes of Seymour Hersh and MIT professor Theodore Postol, and its US government connections pointed out by many others, including Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal at The Gray Zone. And now we have the mainstream media’s wall of silence on the leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concerning the Douma chemical attack and the doctoring of their report that led to the illegal U.S. bombing of Syria in the spring of 2018. Bellingcat was at the forefront of providing justification for such bombing, and now the journalists Peter Hitchens, Tareq Harrad (who recently resigned from Newsweek after accusing the publication of suppressing his revelations about the OPCW scandal) and others are fighting an uphill battle to get the truth out.

Yet Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World won the Emmy, fulfilling Bernays’ point about films being the greatest unconscious carriers of propaganda in the world today.

Who presented the Emmy Award to the film makers, but none other than the rebel journalist Chris Hedges. Why he did so, I don’t know. But that he did so clearly sends a message to those who follow his work and trust him that it’s okay to give a major cultural award to a propaganda outfit. But then, perhaps he doesn’t consider Bellingcat to be that.

Nor, one presumes, does The Intercept, the billionaire Pierre Omidyar owned publication associated with Glen Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, and also read by many progressive-minded people. The Intercept that earlier this year disbanded the small team that was tasked with reviewing and releasing more of the massive trove of documents they received from Edward Snowden six years ago, a minute number of which have ever been released or probably ever will be. As Whitney Webb pointed out, last year The Intercept hosted a workshop for Bellingcat. She wrote:

The Intercept, along with its parent company First Look Media,recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using “open source” tools — with Bellingcat’s past, controversial investigations for use as case studies…Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as “independent” and “investigative journalism.”

Then we have Jefferson Morley, the editor of The Deep State, former Washington Post journalist, and JFK assassination researcher, who has written a praiseworthy review of the Bellingcat film and who supports Bellingcat. “In my experience, Bellingcat is credible,” he writes in an Alternet article, “Bellingcat documentary has the pace and plot of a thriller.”

Morley has also just written an article for Counterpunch – “Why the Douma Chemical Attack Wasn’t a ‘Managed Massacre’” – in which he disputes the claim that the April 7, 2018 attack in the Damascus suburb was a false flag operation carried out by Assad’s opponents. “I do not see any evidence proving that Douma was a false flag incident,” he writes in this article that is written in a style that leaves one guessing as to what exactly he is saying. It sounds convincing unless one concentrates, and then his double messages emerge. Yet it is the kind of article that certain “sophisticated” left-wing readers might read and feel is insightful. But then Morley, who has written considerably about the CIA, edits a website that advertises itself as “the thinking person’s portal to the world of secret government,” and recently had an exchange with former CIA Director John Brennan where “Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest,” said in February 2017, less than a month after Trump was sworn in as president, that:

With a docile Republican majority in Congress and a demoralized Democratic Party in opposition, the leaders of the Deep State are the most—perhaps the only—credible check in Washington on what Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) calls Trump’s “wrecking ball presidency.”

Is it any wonder that some people might be a bit confused?

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum; “but it isn’t so, nohow.”

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

As a final case in point, there is a recent book by Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control, the story of the chemist known as Dr. Death who ran the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control project, using LSD, torture, electric shock therapy, hypnosis, etc.; developed sadistic methods of torture still used in black sites around the world; and invented various ingenious techniques for assassination, many of which were aimed at Fidel Castro. Gottlieb was responsible for brutal prison and hospital experiments and untold death and suffering inflicted on all sorts of innocent people. His work was depraved in the deepest sense; he worked with Nazis who experimented on Jews despite being Jewish himself.

Kinzer writes in depth about this man who considered himself a patriot and a spiritual person – a humane torturer and killer. It is an eye-opening book for anyone who does not know about Gottlieb, who gave the CIA the essential tools they use in their “organized crime” activities around the world – in the words of Douglass Valentine, the author of The CIA as Organized Crime and The Phoenix Program. Kinzer’s book is good history on Gottlieb; however, he doesn’t venture into the present activities of the CIA and Gottlieb’s patriotic followers, who no doubt exist and go about their business in secret.

After recounting in detail the sordid history of Gottlieb’s secret work that is nauseating to read about, Kinzer leaves the reader with these strange words:

Gottlieb was not a sadist, but he might well have been…. Above all he was an instrument of history. Understanding him is a deeply disturbing way of understanding ourselves.

What possibly could this mean? Not a sadist? An instrument of history? Understanding ourselves? These few sentences, dropped out of nowhere, pull the rug out from under what is generally an illuminating history and what seems like a moral indictment. This language is pure mystification.

Kinzer also concludes that because Gottlieb said so, the CIA failed in their efforts to develop methods of mind control and ended MK-ULTRA’s experiments long ago. Why would he believe the word of a man who personified the agency he worked for: a secret liar? He writes,

When Sydney Gottlieb brought MK-ULTRA to its end in the early 1960s, he told his CIA superiors that he had found no reliable way to wipe away memory, make people abandon their consciences, or commit crimes and then forget them.

SIDNEY  GOTTLIEB
Variously dubbed as a “mad scientist” — “The CIA’s scapegoat” — and “America’s Dr Mengele”

As for those who might think otherwise, Kinzer suggests they have vivid imaginations and are caught up in conspiracy thinking: “This [convincing others that the CIA had developed methods of mind control when they hadn’t] is Sydney Gottlieb’s most unexpected legacy,” he asserts. He says this although Richard Helms, the CIA Director, destroyed all MK-Ultra records.

He says that Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and Helms themselves were caught up in a complete fantasy about mind control because they had seen too many movies and read too many books; mind control was impossible, a failure, a myth, he maintains. It is the stuff of popular culture, entertainment.

In an interview with Chris Hedges, interestingly posted by Jefferson Morley at his website, The Deep State, Hedges agrees with Kinzer. Gottlieb, Dulles, et al. were all deluded. Mind control was impossible. You couldn’t create a Manchurian Candidate; by implication, someone like Sirhan Sirhan could not have been programmed to be a fake Manchurian Candidate and to have no memory of what he did, as he claims. He could not have been mind-controlled by the CIA to perform his part as the seeming assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy while the real killer shot RFK from behind. People who think like this should get real.

Furthermore, as is so common in books such as Kinzer’s, he repeats the canard that JFK and RFK knew about and pressured the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. This is demonstrably false, as shown by the Church Committee and the Assassinations Record Review Board, among many others. That Kinzer takes the word of notorious liars like Richard Helms and the top-level CIA operative Samuel Halpern is simple incredible, something that is hard to consider a mistake. Slipped into a truth sandwich, it is devoured and passed on. But it is false. Bullshit meant to deceive.

But this is how these games are played. If you look carefully, you will see them widely. Inform, enlighten, while throwing in doubletalk and untruths. The small number of people who read such books and articles will come away knowing some history that has no current relevance and being misinformed on other history that does. They will then be in the know, ready to pass their “wisdom” on to those who care to listen. They will not think they are average.

But they will be mind controlled, and the killer cat will roam freely without a bell, ready to devour the unsuspecting mice.

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Quebec’s new basic income plan has proponents dreaming big, others skeptical

$3B anti-poverty plan could provide a blueprint for future policies, proponent says

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CBC News

By Benjamin Shingler

Posted: Dec 12, 2017

The new guaranteed minimum income is part of a $3-billion anti-poverty plan announced Sunday. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The Quebec government has taken a “positive first step” toward a universal basic income with its commitment to provide a set amount of money to those unable to work, says a proponent of the idea.

“I think it’s a move in the right direction,” said Jonathan Brun, co-founder of Revenu de base Québec.

It also, Brun said, “puts the terminology square and centre within government policy.”

The new measure is part of a larger $3-billion anti-poverty plan announced Sunday. An estimated 84,000 Quebecers would qualify for the minimum income, largely those with physical and intellectual disabilities.

By next year, they will see their government assistance increased by at least $73 per month. That figure will reach $440 per month by 2023, bringing their annual guaranteed minimum income to $18,029.

• Quebec to offer basic income for 84,000 people unable to work

Ideally, Brun’s group would have liked the Liberal government to have gone farther, switching many of its welfare programs to a negative income tax that would provide low-income earners with supplemental pay from the government.

He said the new measure, along with the Old Age Security pension provided by the federal government, means two of the most vulnerable segments of the population will receive a guaranteed income in Quebec.

“Hopefully, over time, we’ll add a basic income for others in our society,” he said, adding that, realistically, a more radical move by the Liberals was unlikely less than a year before the next provincial election.

Limited in scope

Other supporters of a universal basic income — which guarantees everyone has enough money to meet their basic needs, regardless of work status — argue the province’s plan doesn’t go far enough.

Karl Widerquist, an associate professor at Georgetown University-Qatar, said the advantage of a true universal basic income is there is no judgment or red tape involved in assessing who is eligible.

The measure being implemented in Quebec is “limiting,” he said, and isn’t necessarily a stepping stone toward something more ambitious.

• Basic income finds support on right as ‘most transparent’ form of redistribution

The plan was announced by Employment Minister François Blais, who championed the notion of a universal basic income before entering politics.

The former academic makes an impassioned case for the policy in his 2001 book, Ending Poverty: A Basic Income for All Canadians, describing it as a politically fraught proposal that would require “a huge effort both morally and intellectually” to implement.

Employment Minister François Blais made the case for the idea in his 2001 book, Ending Poverty: A Basic Income for All Canadians. (Lorimer )

“It is a simple yet radical idea for changing our world and allowing a better life for those who truly need it,” Blais wrote in his book. “It proposes daring solutions to neglected yet fundamental problems.”

The new measure isn’t quite daring enough, in the view of several anti-poverty groups. Yann Tremblay-Marcotte, a spokesperson for the Front commun des personnes assistées sociales du Québec, said it will foster divisions between low-income Quebecers who are eligible and those who are not.

“In his approach, Minister Blais seems to believe that people on social assistance who have no recognized severe limitations do not deserve to improve their conditions,” Tremblay-Marcotte said.

Serge Petitclerc, the spokesperson for the Collectif pour un Québec sans pauvreté, echoed that view, saying the province isn’t “tackling other categories of people in social need or people living in poverty.”

What will we learn?

The idea of a universal basic income, while rarely implemented, has supporters on all sides of the political spectrum.

Proponents on the left argue it represents an opportunity for greater redistribution of wealth, while those on the right see it as a chance to cut back on red tape and give individuals more control over their own lives.

Ontario is testing out a variation of the idea, with 4,000 low-income earners in three communities being given a basic annual income of $17,000.

Finland is also experimenting. A total of 2,000 citizens who receive unemployment benefits will get 560 euros ($782 Canadian) a month over the two-year trial.

The anti-poverty plan was announced by Employment Minister François Blais, who championed the notion of a universal basic income before entering politics. (Jacques Boissinot/Canadian Press)

The new measure in Quebec will serve as a kind of pilot project in its own right, with a far greater sample size than those in Ontario and Finland, Brun said.

Social scientists will be able to use the data to analyze whether the guaranteed income produces benefits in other areas, and reduces the overall burden on the health system and social services.

An experiment carried out in Manitoba, dubbed “Mincome,” between 1974 and 1979, was found to have improved the overall health of residents.

Funny people are more intelligent than their po-faced peers

Research shows that funny people are also nicer to be around.

Source: Funny people are more intelligent than their po-faced peers

theconversation.com

Lowri Dowthwaite

Lecturer in Psychological Interventions, University of Central Lancashire

Oct 16, 2017

Albert Einstein attributed his brilliant mind to having a child-like sense of humour. Indeed, a number of studies have found an association between humour and intelligence.

Researchers in Austria recently discovered that funny people, particularly those who enjoy dark humour, have higher IQs than their less funny peers. They argue that it takes both cognitive and emotional ability to process and produce humour. Their analysis shows that funny people have higher verbal and non-verbal intelligence, and they score lower in mood disturbance and aggressiveness.

Not only are funny people smart, they’re nice to be around. Evidence suggests that having a good sense of humour is linked to high emotional intelligence and is a highly desirable quality in a partner. Evolutionary psychologists describe humour as a “heritable trait” that signals mental fitness and intellectual agility to prospective mates. In studies of attractiveness, both men and women rate funny people as more attractive, and cite having a good sense of humour as being one of the most important traits in a long-term partner.

Negative humour style. Everett Collection/Shutterstock

In psychology we use the term “positive humour style” to refer to people who use humour to enhance relationships and reduce conflict. This type of humour is associated with relationship satisfaction, extroversion and high self-esteem Having a humorous outlook on life is also a good coping strategy. It helps people better manage stress and adversity.

More negative humour styles, such as sarcasm, ridicule and self-defeating humour, do not offer the same benefits. Instead, they tend to alienate people and are more often associated with depressed mood and aggression.

Not only do funny people make other people laugh, they also laugh more themselves. And neurobiology shows that laughter leads to brain changes, which may explain the link between humour and intelligence.

Neuropsychological studies have found that experiencing positive emotional states, such as joy, fun and happiness, increases the production of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine not only make us feel great, it also opens up the learning centres of the brain, which enables and sustains more neural connections. As a result, we become more flexible and creative in our thinking, and better at solving problems. It also boosts our working memory.

Rowan Atkinson has an IQ of 178. GEOFF CADDICK/EPA

Humour for success

Evidence suggests that humour actually boosts perceptions of confidence, competence and status, making funny people very influential. Humour gets people to listen, helps communicate messages and aids learning. It is a powerful tool that many successful leaders use to enhance group cohesiveness and organisational culture. Studies of positive organisations suggest the more fun we have at work the more productive we are, and the less likely we are to suffer burn-out.

The “broaden and build” theory also supports the idea that experiencing positive emotions through humour actually alters our thoughts, actions and physiological responses. It creates a virtuous circle effect that enhances well-being.

Research on the use of humour in education also supports the notion that humour is an effective aid to learning. Several studies have demonstrated that lessons that are delivered with humour are more enjoyable for students, and also enhance students comprehension and recall of the topic.

Given the host of benefits that being funny brings, perhaps we could all benefit from joining a stand-up comedy workshop. It seems like the smart thing to do.

It is stressful to be poor, and that stress can keep people in poverty

And studies like these are the reason why newly elected politicians, law enforcement, most government workers, etc., should be forced to live at the same level of poverty that their poorest constituents survive by. Make that six months at least. 

A growing body of research shows that poverty can impair a person’s cognitive functioning

Source: It is stressful to be poor, and that stress can keep people in poverty – VICE News

news.vice.com

By Tamara Khandaker

Oct 12, 2017

 Have you ever taken on additional shifts at work for some extra cash and then failed an exam because you didn’t study enough? Bought a phone for $0 to save money then only to end up stuck in a three-year contract? Signed up for a high-interest credit card without really reading the fine print because it meant immediate access to funds?

This may be how are brains are wired to operate, according to researchers who have been studying the cognitive mechanisms behind scarcity. They say when we’re under financial stress and focused on solving a problem related to money, our brains tend to tune out other information and hinder our ability to do unrelated tasks. And it may explain why some people who are living in poverty can’t seem to get themselves out of it.

About 4.8 million Canadians, including 1.2 million children, live below the poverty line, according to the latest numbers from Statistics Canada. But behavioural science researchers say lifting people out of the cycle of poverty is not as impossible as we may think, if policy-makers are willing to grasp that the stress of scarcity can alter how you think and react to simple tasks .

“Let’s say you’re short on income or you’re thinking about financial trouble or a cost that you have to pay, your performance on other irrelevant cognitive tasks suffer, so it’s kind of like a trade-off,” Jiaying Zhao, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia who has been studying the scarcity mindset, told VICE Money. “As you focus on one thing, your performance on other things suffers.”

According to Zhao, financial stress challenges the cognitive system — budgeting with a limited amount of money, for example, makes you so focused on the problem at hand that you end up overlooking other useful information or forgetting to do things in the future that could help you with your money problems.

In a recent study, Zhao and co-author Brandon Tomm asked participants to order food off a menu and randomly assigned them budgets of either $20 or $100. The menu also came with calorie information and the option of an 18-percent student discount, written at the bottom.

The researchers used eye tracking to measure attention, and found that with $20, participants zeroed in on prices.

“They didn’t even look at the dishes and calories, and they didn’t even look at the discount,” said Zhao. “They’re doing budgeting — pretty sophisticated math in their heads. And the rich are looking all over the place, and they look more at the discount… This irony of scarcity is is that you focus so heavily on prices, on budgets, that you actually neglect things that could help you.”

The study builds on a 2013 paper Zhao co-authored with renowned Harvard behavioural economist Sendhil Mullaithanan that produced similar results. That study also suggested that poor people end up spending so much energy figuring out how to pay their bills that they are left with less mental capacity to think about how to improve their overall condition in the long-run, leaving them stuck in their current financial situation or even making it worse.  

In one of their studies, they approached 400 people at a mall and gave them two financial scenarios. One was easy and one was hard. While the participants contemplated the solution to the scenario, they were asked to take puzzle-based IQ tests and complete tasks that measured their attention. The researchers found that the ‘poorer’ participants — those whose household income was under $70,000 a year — performed worse on tests when they were given the harder scenario; their IQ was 13 points lower in this scenario than when they were thinking about the easy one. They had found, essentially, that thinking the financial stress of not having money reduced cognitive performance among poor people.  

Experts say that when determining policies for poverty reduction, the government should seriously consider that the stress of being poor can actually perpetuate the cycle of poverty, because of our cognitive limitations.

Zhao has in fact given B.C.’s provincial government  a list of recommendations, including simplifying forms, setting up reminders, and automating procedures and applications, for things like welfare, which currently requires filling out mountains of paperwork, a process that many people, especially the poor, eventually give up on.

To its credit, Employment and Social Development Canada has taken the research of these behavioural theorists into consideration. For example, the department uses nudges to increase interest in its employment search portal and sends email reminders to encourage people to finish their registration. In Ontario, the Behavioural Insights Unit — can you just explain what it is — has worked on a number of different projects like license plate sticker renewals and organ donor registration.

“I think the myth or public perception of poverty is that the poor are poor because they screwed up, because they’re inherently incapable, they lack patience, they don’t have self-control,” Zhao said.

“But what we’re showing is that’s not true because just being poor itself, the context of scarcity, can make you perform worse. If we make things easier, if we alleviate these taxing procedures and burdens, then the people can prosper and get out of this poverty cycle.”

People Ignore Facts That Contradict Their False Beliefs

Source: People Ignore Facts That Contradict Their False Beliefs

With permission from

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Eric ZUESSE

Sept 23, 2017

The more people there are who ignore facts that contradict their beliefs, the likelier a dictatorship will emerge within a given country. Here is how aristocracies, throughout the Ages, have controlled the masses, by taking advantage of this widespread tendency people have, to ignore contrary facts:

What social scientists call “confirmation bias” and have repeatedly found to be rampant,* is causing the public to be easily manipulated, and has thus destroyed democracy by replacing news-reporting, by propaganda — ‘news’ that’s false — in a culture where lies which pump the agendas of the powerful (including lies pumped by the billionaire owners of top ‘news’media and of the media they own) are almost never punished (and are often not even denied to be true). Thus, lies by those powerful liars almost always succeed at enslaving the minds of the millions, to believe what the top economic-and-power class want those millions of people to believe — no matter how false it might happen actually to be. 

Recently, a particularly stark example of this came to my attention. On 15 September 2017, an article that I wrote for the Strategic Culture Foundation, and which was titled by a true statement that I had only recently discovered to be true, was republished at a news-site that I consider one of the best around, “Signs of the Times” or “SOTT” for short, and a reader-comment there, simply rejected that title-statement and the entire article, because it contradicted what the person believes. This commenter entirely ignored the evidence that I had provided in the article, which proved the statement to be true. 

No matter how irrefutable the evidence is, most people reject anything which contradicts their deeply entrenched false beliefs, and this reader-comment crystallized for me, this phenomenon of “confirmation bias” — the phenomenon of ignoring evidence that contradicts what one believes.

The article was titled “Liberalism doesn’t respect a nation’s sovereignty.” I never knew that fact until I researched it, but I found, after looking through (and my article quoting key documents from) the history of the matter, that it’s actually the case: that liberalism (as it’s understood and defined by the scholars of the subject, and as it’s based upon the key formative documents of the historical tradition, “liberalism”) rejects a nation’s sovereignty. This fact shocked me to discover; so, I wrote an article documenting it, and SCF accepted it, and it then became republished at a few other sites, including SOTT.

The reader-comment at SOTT which for me personified confirmation-bias, was (in its entirety): “This is a rather new twist blaming liberals for invading countries. I’ve always associated liberalism with the left wing and democratic, progressive politics. I’ve always associated conservatism with the right wing, big business, militarism and invading other countries. Trying to move the goal posts, are we?”

That person never clicked onto my article’s links documenting the case, nor even read the quotations given in the article itself from John Locke and from Adam Smith, who were key founders of “liberalism” as that tradition has come down to us. He instead ignored all of that evidence, and stated — entirely without evidence of any sort — that I (and SOTT, and SCF, for publishing it) were “Trying to move the goal posts.”

I (a Bernie Sanders voter, and a lifelong progressive and opponent of conservatism) am “Trying to move the goal posts” — how? By pointing out the manufactured phoniness of ‘liberalism’? By pointing out a key way in which liberalism was designed by its aristocratic sponsors (in this case by the aristocrats who sponsored Locke and Smith), to be an ideology that would encourage conquest, empire, and discourage democracy (which is based upon the sanctity of national sovereignty — based upon the lack of imposition of government by or on behalf of anyone who isn’t a resident on the land). Liberalism, I show there, was designed for Empire, not for democracy. That reader simply refused to consider the evidence.

People who insist upon deceiving themselves disgust me. Anyone who blocks out the key relevant facts and persists in believing the lies they were raised with, or became fooled into believing, doesn’t harm only themselves by the lies they believe; they vote on the basis of the lies they believe, and thus these people who refuse to be open-minded destroy democracy, and invite control of the nation by the aristocracy (who sponsor the proponents of those lies). People who refuse to question their own beliefs, become increasingly putrid pools of their own false beliefs, which have been created and nurtured and sustained and become larger and larger pools of lies, by constant repetition from the media and lobbyists of the rich and powerful, so as to enable the exploiters to enslave the masses, via those constantly repeated and embellished lies. 

Such self-‘justifying’ fools, who refuse to clean-up their conceptual pool that’s been increasingly polluted by lies, are enemies of democracy, no matter how much they may consider themselves to be ‘liberals’. They don’t even know the reality of what liberalism is. One thing that it definitely is not (as my article documented) is progressivism (which is utterly opposed to foreign conquest and to the entire imperial project of imposed rule, regardless whether by outright invasions or else by coups).

Thus, we have two dominant ideologies against progressivism: One is conservatism, which everyone recognizes to be against progressivism and for Empire and constant conquest, profitable war for the arms-merchants and for the ‘news’media owners who also benefit from stirring up invasion-fever, not only like William Randolph Hearst did but today like they all do. The other is liberalism, which hides that it’s actually conservative — hides this, by being ever-so-sweet toward certain ethnicities or other groups that are being oppressed domestically, and by vociferously condemning conservatives for what is actually nothing more than the blatancy of conservatism’s favoritism toward the aristocracy.

An authentic democracy cannot be based upon a “demos” (a public) that is overwhelmingly composed of suckers — manipulated fools. Only by means of the tiny aristocracy plus the huge mass of their suckers, does a democracy degenerate into a fascism. (For example, something like this can be supported overwhelmingly by the political Party that dominates the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, state capitals, state legislatures, and runs the U.S. White House, in this ‘democratic’ nation — ‘democratic’ according to the propaganda; but if this were really a democracy, then none of those politicians would be able to win public office.)

* A well-established central finding of psychological research, concerning “confirmation bias” or “motivated reasoning” (which are two phrases referring to people’s tendency to believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of any contrary facts), is that individuals evaluate whatever they read or hear according to their pre-existing ideas about the given subject. Specifically, psychologists have found that people tend to pay attention to whatever confirms their existing ideas, and tend to ignore whatever contradicts those pre-established beliefs.

For examples, the following studies are available online:

“Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs,” in the July 2006 American Journal of Political Science, reported: “We find a confirmation bias – the seeking out of confirmatory evidence – when [people] are free to self-select the source of arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization … especially among those with the strongest priors [prior beliefs] and highest level of political sophistication [the highest degree of exposure to, and involvement in, the given subject-matter that the study was dealing with].” Prejudices were stronger among supposed experts than among non-“experts”: The more indoctrinated a person was, the more prejudiced. “People actively denigrate the information with which they disagree, while accepting compatible information almost at face value.” Moreover, “Those with weak and uninformed attitudes show less bias” (and this is actually one reason why the best jurors at trials are generally people who are not personally or professionally involved in any aspect of the given case – they are “non-experts”).

Sharon Begley’s article in the 25 August 2009 Newsweek titled “Lies of Mass Destruction: The same skewed thinking that supports a Saddam-9/11 link explains the power of health-care myths [such as that Obama’s health plan had ‘death panels’]” summarized the study in the May 2009 Sociological Inquiry, “‘There Must Be a Reason’: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification,” which had surveyed, during October 2004, 49 conservative Republicans who admitted they believed that Saddam Hussein had caused the 9/11 attacks. This study found that 48 of these 49 extreme conservatives were utterly impervious to the overwhelming factual evidence which was provided to them by the presenters that contradicted this false belief they held.

A study concerning not political conservatism but merely resistance to new technologies is James N. Druckman’s “Framing, Motivated Reasoning, and Opinions about Emergent Technologies,” which was presented at a technological conference in 2009. He reported that, “factual information … is perceived in biased ways … (e.g., there is motivated reasoning).” “Facts have limited impact on initial opinions.” Moreover, “Individuals do not privilege the facts. … Individuals process new factual information in a biased manner. … Specifically, they view information consistent with their prior opinions as relatively stronger, and they view neutral facts as consistent with their existing” views.

“Motivated Reasoning With Stereotypes,” in the January 1999 Psychological Inquiry, found that, “When an applicable stereotype supports their desired impression of an individual, motivation can lead people to activate this stereotype, if they have not already activated it. … People pick and choose among the many stereotypes applicable to an individual, activating those that support their desired impression of this individual and inhibiting those that interfere with it.” Similarly, another research report, “The Undeserving Rich: ‘Moral Values’ and the White Working Class,” in the June 2009 Sociological Forum, found that John Kerry had probably lost the 2004 U.S. Presidential election to George W. Bush at least partly because white working class voters overwhelmingly believed that Bush was like themselves because he behaved like themselves, and that Kerry was not like themselves because his manner seemed “snooty.”

It’s an Alpha Male Thing: What Dominant Chimpanzees and Donald Trump Have in Common

Source: It’s an Alpha Male Thing: What Dominant Chimpanzees and Donald Trump Have in Common | Alternet

http://www.alternet.org

By Dan P. McAdams / The Guardian

September 14, 2017

Donald Trump’s Twitter tirades and demands for fealty show he prefers an ape-like strategy for success.

Photo Credit: Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com

From early 1974 through most of 1976, a male chimpanzee named Yeroen held the position of alpha leader in the large, open-air chimpanzee colony at Burgers zoo in Arnhem in the Netherlands. His reign was roughly coterminous with the presidential administration of Gerald R Ford in the United States.

Yeroen became famous (among Homo sapiens) when the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal showcased his leadership style in a classic 1982 book, Chimpanzee Politics. In their Machiavellian machinations and power games, De Waal argued, chimps turn out to be a lot like human beings.

The curious case of Donald Trump, however, now shows that human beings turn out to be a lot like chimps.

In the wild and in captivity, chimpanzee colonies organize themselves into tightly structured hierarchies. Power is vested in the biggest, strongest, and most outgoing males in the group, with the alpha male on top. The alpha leader dominates all others through tactics of threat, intimidation, bluffing, and outright aggression – and importantly, by forming short-term, pragmatic coalitions (let us call them “deals”) with other high-status males.

Chimpanzee politics can be intricate, but they always obey the rules of social dominance. Because chimps and humans evolved from a common ancestor going back 5-7m years, we humans know deep in our brains what social dominance is all about. Our expectation that social status can be seized through physical power and threat – that the strongest, biggest and boldest may indeed lord it over the rest of us – is very old, awesomely intuitive, and deeply ingrained.

Social psychologists today distinguish between the social dominance form of human leadership, on the one hand, and leadership through prestige on the other. Both are grounded in human evolution, but the prestige form is younger, tracing back a mere million years or so to the time when our hominid ancestors began to form culture. In the prestige paradigm, leaders attain their authority in the group by demonstrating culturally valued expertise – as, for example, in cooking, defending the tribe, healing, peacemaking, or (in the modern world) science, education, technology, the arts, business, law, medicine, communication, and so on.

For human beings today, dominance and prestige compete with each other as the two primal expressions of leadership.

When it comes to US presidents, we expect to see a bit of both.

For Trump, however, it is dominance all the way through.

An especially effective dominance mechanism for the alpha chimp is the charging display. The top male essentially goes berserk and starts screaming, hooting, and gesticulating wildly as he charges toward other males nearby. Pandemonium ensues as rival males cower in fear and females grab their little ones and run for cover.

Once the chaos ends, there is a period of peace and order, wherein rival males pay homage to the alpha, visiting him, grooming him, expressing various forms of submission.

Trump’s incendiary tweets are the human equivalent of a charging display. Designed to intimidate his foes and rally his submissive base, these verbal outbursts reinforce the president’s dominance by reminding everybody of his wrath and his force. When the alpha chimp charges, you cannot help but take note – with your ears and with your eyes.

Look at Mr Trump. What do you see? He is physically big and dynamic. His face gives the impression of a volcano about to explode. And explode he does, with regularity. Trump is more overtly aggressive than any political figure in the United States today, so aggressive, so insulting, so egregiously denigrating that you thought he might not be bluffing when, for example, he threatened to “lock Hillary up”, or when he warned North Korea that it “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”.

Throughout primate evolution, bluffing appears prominently on every syllabus ever written for dominance psychology 101 (including The Art of the Deal). It was a standard tactic for Yeroen. But is Trump bluffing? What if he isn’t?

One of the most bizarre (and psychologically telling) events in the Trump administration so far was the president’s first full cabinet meeting, on 12 June 2017.

With the cameras rolling, each cabinet official in turn proclaimed how honored or blessed he (or she) was to serve the primal leader. The vice-president, Mike Pence, began the submission fest with these words: “Thank you, Mr President, and this is the greatest privilege of my life, to serve as vice-president to a president who is keeping his word to the American people and assembling a team that is bringing real change, real prosperity, and real strength back to our nation.”

And on it went, around the room, one obsequious gesture after another. Similarly, chimps show a wide range of deference displays in the presence of the alpha, including grooming, stroking, bowing, and other variations on the theme of sucking up.

In the prestige paradigm of leadership, the president’s cabinet would be viewed as a body of experts charged with running government agencies and providing the president with critical advice. But under the aegis of dominance, specific expertise is irrelevant. What matters instead is fealty to the alpha.

This is why Trump will never forgive the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for recusing himself from investigations into charges that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. In a July interview, Trump described Sessions’ move as “very unfair to the president”.

And this is why various officials in the administration all now know what Sean Spicer learned early in his short tenure as White House press secretary: you may think you are speaking to the American people, but in reality there is an audience of one.

Even the biggest and most aggressive alpha chimp needs allies if he is going to hold on to power. Psychological research shows that among chimps and humans, socially dominant leaders are especially inclined to form short-term contractual relationships that are grounded in pragmatics rather than principle – temporary deals that work today, but may be gone tomorrow: “You may be a horrible person, but if you work with me on Task A today, I will work with you on Task B tomorrow. By Friday, we may be opponents on some other deal, we may even be trying to kill each other off, but hey, Friday is way in the future, and chimps do not project their leadership programs too far into the future.”

Nor does Trump, it seems. Many observers have remarked upon his short-term, contractual approach to international relations and to negotiating with Congress. “He’ll promise you the world,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former state department official. “And 48 hours later, he’ll betray you without a thought. He won’t even know that he’ll be betraying you.”

The alpha chimp’s focus on temporary arrangements designed to serve immediate goals brings us to the hollow core of Trump’s personality. In a psychological profile I wrote in early 2016, when he was a candidate, I remarked that it is very difficult to discern a moral narrative in Trump’s head about how he came to be the person he is becoming. To the extent there is a narrative there, it is something vague about fighting to win.

Psychological research suggests that constructing a self-defining story about who you are, were, and will be is a signal psychological task of adulthood. Nearly every leader, moreover, draws upon his or her internalized self-narrative for moral and strategic guidance, and to inspire those whom the leader leads.

As different as they were in their approaches to leadership, both Barack Obama and George W Bush created highly redemptive stories – narratives of suffering and hope – to make sense of their lives. Those stories informed their presidencies, for better and for worse.

By his own admission,Trump is not an especially introspective person. Nor is he retrospective or prospective. There is very little by way of a narrative arc to Trump’s consciousness. Instead, he lives in the angry contractual moment, moment to moment, deal-making scene to deal-making scene, episodic – more like an episode of Seinfeld than a feature-length movie.

The goal for each moment is to win the moment. And that is it. There is no storyline beyond winning the moment. There is no overarching moral narrative of atonement or liberation or progress. There is no valued end state toward which you and the people you lead strive in the long term, no envisioned end to the story in which Americans enjoy greater freedom, equality, or happiness.

Almost 40 years ago, in an interview with People magazine, Trump said: “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.” His philosophical musing on human nature applies even better to life in a chimpanzee colony. The alpha chimp survives each angry moment to win the next battle – until his winning streak ends.

Dan P McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers professor of psychology at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Art and Science of Personality Development and the author of the recent paper The Appeal of the Primal Leader: Human Evolution and Donald J Trump

Teaching People To Visualize An Outcome More Effective Than Teaching People What To Do

Source: Teaching People To Visualize An Outcome More Effective Than Teaching People What To Do

With permission from

preventdisease.com

Josh Richardson

Sept 3, 2017

An established but little known psychological theory is likely to improve performances across a range of activities, including sport, according to new research published that can be applied to amateurs or skilled performers alike says psychologist Dr Warren Mansell, from The University of Manchester.

Many philosophers believed that all behaviors are predetermined and have a causal lineage. Some of the factors believed to influence determinism include genetics, environment, and past and present experiences.

Adam Bear, Ph.D performed a couple of simple experiments to test how we experience choices.

What role does memory play in directing our attention to specific details in our surroundings?

Results of Perceptual Control Theory experiments have demonstrated that an organism controls neither its own behavior, nor external environmental variables, but rather its own perceptions of those variables. Actions are not controlled, they are varied so as to cancel the effects that unpredictable environmental disturbances would otherwise have on controlled perceptions. According to the standard catch-phrase of the field, “behavior is the control of perception.”

The theory argues that when trying to improve performance, teaching people what to do is less effective than teaching them how to picture the outcome.

Higher level control systems often are able to use known strategies (which are themselves acquired through prior reorganizations) to seek perceptions that don’t produce the conflict. Normally, this takes place without notice. If the conflict persists and systematic “problem solving” by higher systems fails, the reorganization system may modify existing systems until they bypass the conflict or until they produce new reference signals (goals) that are not in conflict at lower levels.

It has been already been used to accurately model the skills necessary for fielders to get to the right location on the pitch to catch a ball, such as in baseball or cricket.

But according to Dr Mansell, it could be used across sport and the performing arts.

To test the theory, the 48 participants in Dr Mansell’s study were asked to draw images using different instructions.

The images ranged from complex to simple symbols and participants were asked to either copy them directly, copy from memory, or copy by giving instructions on how to move the pen. They were also told draw the image after being told what it looked like.

Describing the image led to significantly more accurate drawings than giving the instructions for what movements to make. 

He said: “We commonly instruct people in terms of the physical actions they must carry out in order to perform any task.

“Our study – which we think is the first of its kind – tests the effect of describing how to perform a skill in terms of the perception of the outcome compared to the observable actions.

“And the results were fascinating: the accuracy of the drawings where participants were told what to perceive was almost as good as copying the image directly.”

The theory could also be applied to dance, says Dr Mansell: learning a complex routine is all about an internal sense of where it feels right, rather than obsessing on movements, he argues.

He added: “There is a physiological explanation to this: muscle groups interfere with each other by contracting against another when performing a variety of tasks – whether that’s drawing, dancing or catching a ball.

“So you may not be able to accurately instruct your limbs what to do, but creating a mental picture of the desired outcome gets around that in efficient manner.

Carla Brown-Ojeda, the student who conducted the study, explained: “Different coaches in sport use a wide array of methods, some of which involve the coach directly instructing the learner how to move. Yet if our research generalises, then a simpler, purely ‘perceptual’, method might be developed.”

 

Does Our Perception Precede Our Decisions?

Who’s in control? Body language experts share Putin, Trump G20 observations with RT

Source: Who’s in control? Body language experts share Putin, Trump G20 observations with RT — RT News

RT News

9 Jul, 2017

 

 

There’s more to the G20 summit than the words exchanged between world leaders, according to body language expert Robert Phipps, who examined the participants’ non-verbal gestures and shared his findings with RT.

A video of the gathering shows a much-anticipated handshake between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The way Trump conducted himself during that handshake can mean one of two things, according to Phipps.

“Trump extends his hand for the handshake first, and as Putin reciprocates, you then see the left hand of Trump come underneath the forearm of Putin,” he told RT.

“It’s either an emotional connection or it’s an attempt at a controlling gesture,” he added.

As for Putin’s behavior, Phipps noted that the Russian leader pointed his finger at Trump.

“A finger point is generally quite an aggressive signal,” he said.

Trump may not have viewed it that way, however, as he is later seen patting Putin on the back with his left hand.

“Again, this can be seen as either affectionate or controlling,” Phipps said.

The two leaders later reprised their handshake for the cameras. © Carlos Barria / Reuters

Putin’s decision of where to stand – behind a table – during his meeting with foreign counterparts was also notable, according to Phipps.

“That can be seen as a barrier to the other leaders.”

As for the family photo of G20 leaders, Phipps said the placement of each person was worth noting.

“Merkel is hosting the event so she’s front and center, which is where you would expect her to be. And generally speaking, the power disseminates the further away from the center of power that you get.”

That statement is interesting, considering Trump was almost at the very end of the front row, with only French President Emmanuel Macron standing between the US president and empty space.

Phipps said although it is assumed the leaders are placed in their positions rather than freely choosing him, he said Macron appeared to have chosen his spot.

“That seemed to be a choice from what I can see from the video, because he goes along and deliberately sort of moves to the outside of Trump, which puts Trump not on the outside… so Macron is reaching out to Trump.”

© Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters

Phipps went on to observe a conversation – and a chest punch – between Macron and Trump after the photo was taken.

“Macron actually starts talking to Trump and he punches him in the chest, just very gently, which I thought was very interesting, because that again can be seen as a slight bullying, but with an affectionate part to it as well.”

“But he’s basically saying – whatever he’s talking about I don’t know – but what he’s saying is, ‘Come on, you’ve got to do this…’ because otherwise there’s no reason for the punch in the chest.”

© Kay Nietfeld / Reuters

When asked by RT if there was a leader whose behavior on the world stage is particularly interesting, Phipps responded by saying: “Trump is the exception because he uses a lot of controlling gestures” when meeting world leaders, noting that “in reality they should all meet on equal terms.”

Another body language expert, Darren Stanton, also commented on the world leader’s gestures during G20 Summit in Hamburg, noting “dominance and power gestures” by both Putin and Trump. 

“The thing about president Trump is classic when shaking hands, very much into dominance and power,” Stanton told RT. “The thing about this particular photograph is an open palm gesture as ‘I mean you no harm’, or the old meaning as ‘I have no weapons.’ And there was a hesitance from president Putin almost like ‘Is this a new strategy that I am aware of?’ I think there was a little bit of a thought there of ‘what should I do.’”

Stanton noted that he saw some footage when both men were side by side and “President Trump got this what is called reverse Steeple gesture with the hands and that is again confidence and dominance.”

“And then we also see president Putin with his legs sort of quite spread apart and that is a very classic dominance gesture,” Stanton said.

So in Stanton’s opinion, “although the men have the mutual respect for each other… president Trump still want to be seen as the top man.”

Dunning-Kruger effect – The illusion of competence

Source: Dunning-Kruger effect – The illusion of competence — Science of the Spirit — Sott.net

http://www.sott.net

Kate Fehlhaber/Edited by Pam Weintraub
Aeon
Wed, 17 May 2017

© Photo courtesy Wikipedia
Look out! Head-on car crash in rural South Dakota in 1932. Eighty per cent of drivers rate themselves as above average.

One day in 1995, a large, heavy middle-aged man robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. He didn’t wear a mask or any sort of disguise. And he smiled at surveillance cameras before walking out of each bank. Later that night, police arrested a surprised McArthur Wheeler. When they showed him the surveillance tapes, Wheeler stared in disbelief. ‘But I wore the juice,’ he mumbled. Apparently, Wheeler thought that rubbing lemon juice on his skin would render him invisible to videotape cameras. After all, lemon juice is used as invisible ink so, as long as he didn’t come near a heat source, he should have been completely invisible.

Police concluded that Wheeler was not crazy or on drugs – just incredibly mistaken.

The saga caught the eye of the psychologist David Dunning at Cornell University, who enlisted his graduate student, Justin Kruger, to see what was going on. They reasoned that, while almost everyone holds favourable views of their abilities in various social and intellectual domains, some people mistakenly assess their abilities as being much higher than they actually are. This ‘illusion of confidence’ is now called the ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’, and describes the cognitive bias to inflate self-assessment.

To investigate this phenomenon in the lab, Dunning and Kruger designed some clever experiments. In one study, they asked undergraduate students a series of questions about grammar, logic and jokes, and then asked each student to estimate his or her score overall, as well as their relative rank compared to the other students. Interestingly, students who scored the lowest in these cognitive tasks always overestimated how well they did – by a lot. Students who scored in the bottom quartile estimated that they had performed better than two-thirds of the other students!

This ‘illusion of confidence’ extends beyond the classroom and permeates everyday life. In a follow-up study, Dunning and Kruger left the lab and went to a gun range, where they quizzed gun hobbyists about gun safety. Similar to their previous findings, those who answered the fewest questions correctly wildly overestimated their knowledge about firearms. Outside of factual knowledge, though, the Dunning-Kruger effect can also be observed in people’s self-assessment of a myriad of other personal abilities. If you watch any talent show on television today, you will see the shock on the faces of contestants who don’t make it past auditions and are rejected by the judges. While it is almost comical to us, these people are genuinely unaware of how much they have been misled by their illusory superiority.

Sure, it’s typical for people to overestimate their abilities. One study found that 80 per cent of drivers rate themselves as above average – a statistical impossibility. And similar trends have been found when people rate their relative popularity and cognitive abilities. The problem is that when people are incompetent, not only do they reach wrong conclusions and make unfortunate choices but, also, they are robbed of the ability to realise their mistakes. In a semester-long study of college students, good students could better predict their performance on future exams given feedback about their scores and relative percentile. However, the poorest performers showed no recognition, despite clear and repeated feedback that they were doing badly. Instead of being confused, perplexed or thoughtful about their erroneous ways, incompetent people insist that their ways are correct. As Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man (1871): ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’

Interestingly, really smart people also fail to accurately self-assess their abilities. As much as D- and F-grade students overestimate their abilities, A-grade students underestimate theirs. In their classic study, Dunning and Kruger found that high-performing students, whose cognitive scores were in the top quartile, underestimated their relative competence. These students presumed that if these cognitive tasks were easy for them, then they must be just as easy or even easier for everyone else. This so-called ‘imposter syndrome’ can be likened to the inverse of the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby high achievers fail to recognise their talents and think that others are equally competent. The difference is that competent people can and do adjust their self-assessment given appropriate feedback, while incompetent individuals cannot.

And therein lies the key to not ending up like the witless bank robber. Sometimes we try things that lead to favourable outcomes, but other times – like the lemon juice idea – our approaches are imperfect, irrational, inept or just plain stupid. The trick is to not be fooled by illusions of superiority and to learn to accurately reevaluate our competence. After all, as Confucius reportedly said, real knowledge is knowing the extent of one’s ignorance.

The Penis Causes Global Warming? Peer-reviewed science journal gets HOAXED by fake science paper that claims PENISES cause climate change

 I am a social scientist and I have always been appalled at the pseudo language used in social sciences. This fake obfuscation of the truth rattles me. If you cannot write or say something that the reasonably educated person cannot comprehend, you are pissing in the wind.

Source: Peer-reviewed science journal gets HOAXED by fake science paper that claims PENISES cause climate change – NaturalNews.com

With permission from

http://www.naturalnews.com

by: Mike Adams

May 20, 2017

 (Natural News) Remember when I said recently that the entire left-wing scientific establishment has become convinced that everything causes climate change? My assertion has now been confirmed beyond any doubt.

A peer-reviewed science journal has just been caught publishing a hilariously fake science paper — written in leftish-sounding “sciency gibberish” — that literally claims penises cause climate change.

Because this junk science assertion fits into the lunatic narrative of the totalitarian Left, it was reviewed by multiple scientists and accepted for publication, even though the entire paper was deliberately written to consist of indecipherable nonsense pretending to sound like elitist left-wing “science.” (Find more news about fake science at FakeScience.news.)

James Delingpole at Breitbart.com covers this hilarious development as follows:

Gender studies is a fake academic industry populated by charlatans, deranged activists and gullible idiots.

Now, a pair of enterprising hoaxers has proved it scientifically by persuading an academic journal to peer-review and publish their paper claiming that the penis is not really a male genital organ but a social construct.

The paper, published by Cogent Social Sciences – “a multidisciplinary open access journal offering high quality peer review across the social sciences” – also claims that penises are responsible for causing climate change.

The two hoaxers are Peter Boghossian, a full-time faculty member in the Philosophy department at Portland State University, and James Lindsay, who has a doctorate in math and a background in physics.

They were hoping to emulate probably the most famous academic hoax in recent years: the Sokal Hoax – named after NYU and UCL physics professor Alan Sokal – who in 1996 persuaded an academic journal called Social Text to accept a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”.

Sokal’s paper – comprising pages of impressive-sounding but meaningless pseudo-academic jargon – was written in part to demonstrate that humanities journals will publish pretty much anything so long as it sounds like “proper leftist thought;” and partly in order to send up the absurdity of so much post-modernist social science.

So, for this new spoof, Boghossian and Lindsay were careful to throw in lots of signifier phrases to indicate fashionable anti-male bias:

We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.

They also took care to make it completely incomprehensible.

We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

Some of it was written with the help of the Postmodern Generator – “a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, based on NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s method of hoaxing a cultural studies journal called Social Text, that returns a different fake postmodern ‘paper’ every time the page is reloaded.”

… None of it should have survived more than a moment’s scrutiny by serious academics. But it was peer-reviewed by two experts in the field who, after suggesting only a few changes, passed it for publication:

Cogent Social Sciences eventually accepted “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” The reviewers were amazingly encouraging, giving us very high marks in nearly every category. For example, one reviewer graded our thesis statement “sound” and praised it thusly, “It capturs [sic] the issue of hypermasculinity through a multi-dimensional and nonlinear process” (which we take to mean that it wanders aimlessly through many layers of jargon and nonsense). The other reviewer marked the thesis, along with the entire paper, “outstanding” in every applicable category.

They didn’t accept the paper outright, however. Cogent Social Sciences’ Reviewer #2 offered us a few relatively easy fixes to make our paper “better.” We effortlessly completed them in about two hours, putting in a little more nonsense about “manspreading” (which we alleged to be a cause of climate change) and “dick-measuring contests.”

No claim made in the paper was considered too ludicrous by the peer-reviewers: not even the one claiming that the penis is “the universal performative source of rape, and is the conceptual driver behind much of climate change.”

The artist’s dilemma: what constitutes selling out?

With more and more street artists partnering with corporations, it’s important that they don’t compromise their moral standing to earn a living.

Source: The artist’s dilemma: what constitutes selling out?

https://theconversation.com

December 1, 2015

Yoav Litvin

Postdoctoral Research Associate, The Rockefeller University

Disclosure statement

Yoav Litvin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

The Conversation is funded by Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Knight Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Alfred P Sloan Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation and the Simons Foundation. Our global publishing platform is funded by Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

The artist’s dilemma: what constitutes selling out?

Intellectuals, academics and artists play a unique role in society: they preserve and defend both freedom of expression and the morality of choices. Artists can use their work as a means to communicate messages of dissent and hope in the face of injustice, repression and despair.

Meanwhile, those in power who seek to control public opinion typically consider untethered freedom of thought and expression a threat.

But in any capitalist system, it’s difficult to survive as a full-time artist. Artists need to be industrious in order to make a living from art, and may choose to work with government organizations or corporations to supplement their income.

Herein lies what I’ve dubbed the “artist’s dilemma”: how does one cooperate with a large entity while ensuring moral ground? In other words, what constitutes “selling out,” arguably the worst insult that can be lobbed at an artist?

It’s an issue that has come to the forefront, especially for street artists, who seem to be increasingly collaborating with businesses and corporations. Companies will often seek to cultivate artists as a way to enhance their brand, and street art can have the effect of making a product look more authentic, edgy and gritty.

Recently, a blogger and a group of artists have partnered with Amazon to produce and sell a series of limited edition prints, and the USA Network commissioned artists to promote a new TV series by producing ads that look like authentic works of street art.

Meanwhile, in some instances, the boundaries between political activism and commodification have blurred. Earlier this year, the street artist Gilf! made headlines for wrapping yellow caution tape with the words “Gentrification in Progress” around shuttered buildings throughout New York City. But the caution tape can now be had for the price of US$60.

In response to these trends within the world of street art, some claim that the genre – specifically, its festivals – have “sold out.” Others make the puzzling argument that this debate is outdated because the genre of street art “has been recognizable since the ‘70’s and ’80’s.”

What is apparent is that with the growth of corporate control over public spaces – along with the relentless attempt of corporate entities to commodify anything and everything – the debate about street art and artists “selling out” is not only relevant, it’s necessary.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma: an analogy

In order to methodically tackle this issue, it’s useful to look at it through the lens of The Prisoner’s Dilemma, a game analyzed by use of principles of game theory.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma, developed by mathematicians Merrill Flood and Melvin Dreshner, is an analysis of a hypothetical situation. The police apprehend two accomplices for committing a minor crime, but they’re suspected of a greater offense. The evidence for the greater offense, however, is circumstantial. The police need their confession to convict.

For this purpose, the accomplices are separated and individually presented with the following options: squeal on your partner and go free (and be absolved of the lesser crime) or remain silent and risk your partner squealing on you, in which case you’ll get the maximum prison term for the major offense.

But there are two more possible scenarios: if both prisoners squeal, they each get an intermediate sentence. Lastly, if both prisoners stay silent, they’ll be tried for the lesser offense, and could still end up in jail.

Studies show that although game theory predicts that the rational choice for each prisoner (dictated by self-preservation) is to squeal on his or her partner, most humans will attempt to at least remain faithful to their partner once before giving them up, which demonstrates the tendency of humans to value social bonds.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma.

The artist’s dilemma

So what does this have to do with artists, their art and the idea of selling out?

Let’s apply a similar “two-by-two” approach to the artist’s dilemma.

Many artists use the streets as an ad space for their art; they view the public as potential clients and pride themselves on corporate partnerships, which can be quite lucrative.

In this case, as long as artists are clear about their overarching goal – promoting sales in a capitalist market – they can’t “sell out.” In a sense, these artists are smaller versions of commercial enterprises that use public space to advertise their products (often without having to pay for the space).

At the same time, artists who have any kind of moral presumptions guiding their work need to assume certain responsibilities. For one, if they are receiving funding from a corporation or government organization, they need to research each entity’s respective agendas. It could simply mean doing some background research on the internet, but it could also entail communicating with the organization itself and asking what it stands for, what it opposes and what its mission and goals are.

If, after adequate research, the entity’s agenda coincides with the artist’s, the work is morally kosher.

However, education also entails risk: if the artist discovers the entity is morally corrupt, at least by his or her definition, it’s the obligation of the artist to forfeit the financial opportunity in order to hold moral ground.

If the artist has found that the organization is morally corrupt and still chooses to work with it – well, the artist is, by definition, selling out.

There’s another outcome: the artist can choose to stay ignorant and work with any organization solely for the money. If the artist is lucky, the organization turns out to be morally sound. However, if the organization turns out to be morally corrupt, the artist can’t simply plead ignorance when being called a sellout.

Pleading ignorance, of course, doesn’t excuse the artist from the consequences of collaborating with a morally corrupt organization. At the very least, he or she must assume responsibility after the fact.

Organizations and corporations involved in the arts also have a moral responsibility. They need to be transparent about their policies and political agendas so that artists can make informed decisions, and don’t have to do all the work themselves.

The artist’s dilemma.

 

The case of Shepard Fairey

Shepard Fairey (known for his iconic OBEY slogan) is one of the world’s most renowned street artists. But in addition to his work on the streets, Fairey runs a thriving graphic design business that caters to big corporations, including some with questionable moral standing, like Nike and Saks Fifth Avenue. (For a full list, click here.)

In an interview with arts critic Stephen Heller, the artist justifies his dealings with corporations by stating:

if it was not supplied to the corporations by me, then it would be supplied by other hungry designers.

According to this statement, it’s apparent that even though Fairey is aware of the questionable moral agendas of some of the corporations that commission him, he still takes their money.

So is he a sellout? Not according to Fairey’s definition of selling out.

In one interview, Fairey defines selling out as “compromising your values to pander to the lowest common denominator.”

In another, he elaborates: “To me selling out is doing things purely for the money without concern for the consequences to integrity.”

And in his new book Covert to Overt, Fairey details what he calls his “inside/outside” strategy of work:

…doing things on my own terms outside of the system when necessary, while also seizing opportunities to infiltrate the system and use its machinery to spread my art and ideas, hoping to change the system for the better in the process.

Here, Fairey assumes a Robin Hood-like approach: taking from exploitative corporations and using his commissioned art to chip away at their influence by, for example, raising awareness about war.

Shepard Fairey leaves his mark in London’s East End. tim rich and lesley katon/flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

 

Fairey’s dealings with corporations fall within the definitions of selling out, as outlined by the artist’s dilemma. And one must wonder how much influence corporate entities have over Fairey’s art and messaging – surely the commissioned work, but also his street works.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that these dealings have enabled him to devote significant time and resources to putting up works on the streets that endorse progressive, noncommercial (even anti-commercial) causes. So in order to evaluate whether or not Fairey is selling out, it seems that one must weigh the influence of corporate interests on his work versus the benefits of Fairey’s works on the streets.

The example of Fairey demonstrates the limitations of applying a simple two-by-two theory as a sweeping criterion. Nevertheless, the artist’s dilemma can act as a frame for this important discussion: it unequivocally demonstrates that artists need to be transparent and accountable. They have a responsibility to forge moral alliances with employers that could have potentially conflicting agendas.

Video: How to Tell If Someone Is Lying, Featuring President Obama (4 min)

“The USA has a long standing practice of non intervention in foreign affairs.” OMG, these people really think that we are dumb. They’re probably right, as we keep electing them liars politicians to represent us.

Source: Video: How to Tell If Someone Is Lying, Featuring President Obama | The Daily Sheeple

http://www.thedailysheeple.com

Jan 13, 2016

Truthstream Media

Here are some hallmark examples of verbal and bodily cues that lying liars exhibit when they lie, as demonstrated for you by the president… with a bonus from the State Dept.

The question in this particular example regarded how the federal government would go about confiscating America’s guns, asked by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ husband Mark Kelly. After a lengthy subject change of nearly a minute, the president said he believed Kelly was alluding to a conspiracy to disarm American citizens and impose martial law.

Delivered by The Daily Sheeple

Lots of People Think Complete Nonsense Is Profound, Study Finds

Where do you fall on the bulls**t receptivity scale?

Source: Lots of People Think Complete Nonsense Is Profound, Study Finds | Mental Floss

http://mentalfloss.com

Shaunacy Ferro

December 2, 2015

 

Image credit: 

iStock

People are incredibly receptive to meaningless buzzwords, according to a new study in the journal Judgment and Decision Making. Yes, the vast majority of people are willing to believe complete bullshit, to use the scholarly term. (Title of the study: “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit.”)

Over the course of four different experiments including hundreds of participants, researchers from Canada’s University of Waterloo and Sheridan College tested how profound people would rate a bunch of buzzwords strung together in a plausible syntactic structure. The psychologists intended to establish a method of testing people’s individual receptivity to bullshit. 

Participants rated statements on a scale of profundity from 1 to 5, 5 being “very profound.” As source material, the researchers used Wisdom of Chopra, a site that draws words from the tweets of holistic health guru Deepak Chopra (sample tweet: “experience is made out of awareness”) and turns them into randomly generated sentences; and a website called New Age Bullshit Generator, which comes up with a slew of nonsense phrases based on New Age buzzwords. In a subsequent experiment, they used actual tweets from Chopra deemed to be particularly vague. In another, they compared motivational quotes like “a river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but its persistence” to regular statements like “most people enjoy some sort of music.” In the fourth, they also tested people’s tendency to agree with conspiracies. The hundreds of subjects in the final three studies were all recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and paid for their participation.  

The researchers found that people vary in their proclivity to assign profound meaning to vague statements, a characteristic they call “bullshit receptivity.” But some people will find almost anything profound, including not very insightful sentences like “most people enjoy some sort of music.” A quarter of the 280 participants in one experiment rated the randomly generated sentences from Wisdom of Chopra and the New Age Bullshit Generator as a 3 or higher on the 5-point profundity scale, indicating that they found them pretty meaningful. “These results indicate that our participants largely failed to detect that the statements are bullshit,” the researchers write. 

This may be the result of a lack of critical thinking. Those who are particularly receptive to bullshit, the researchers found, tend to show lower cognitive abilities (like verbal intelligence); are less reflective; more prone to conspiracy theories; more likely to subscribe to religion and belief in the paranormal; and more likely to be a fan of alternative medicine. (The latter, of course, you could probably have predicted based on the motivational quotes that show up on your hippie relative’s Facebook feed.) 

So why do so many people fall prey to complete nonsense masquerading as deep thoughts? It could be that they’re just categorically open minded, and accept these statements without critical thought. It could also be a factor of verbal intelligence, since people with higher verbal intelligence, the researchers hypothesize, would have greater knowledge of word meanings that might help them detect the banality of a statement. Or, it could be that people naturally assume that the statements provided to them in the course of a psychological study must have some meaning.

Regardless, we should all cultivate a little more awareness of the bullshit around us. As Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it in his essay (later book) “On Bullshit” [PDF], “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”  

[h/t The Washington Post]

How Popular Music’s Lyrics Perpetuate American Idiocy

The rise of idiot America has been mainly for profit.

Source: How Popular Music’s Lyrics Perpetuate American Idiocy

http://theantimedia.org

Claire Bernish
May 20, 2015

(ANTIMEDIA) A recent study served to confirm the patently obvious: song lyrics for the most popular genres of music are ridiculously obtuse — and getting worse over time. Though this might not be a revelation, the figures are distressing indicators of both an intellectually vapid societal and cultural future as well as its apparent inevitability.

If you’ve already moved away from Billboard music, congratulations, you refuse to be insulted. But if you haven’t, or if you’re concerned about pop culture trends acting as portents of systemic dysfunction, you should probably pay attention. Andrew Powell-Morse of SeatSmart studied the “Lyric Intelligence” of 225 Billboard songs in the Pop, Country, Hip-hop, and Rock genres that spent three or more weeks parked at the top of the charts to analyze any changes over the course of ten years. And change there was.

Ten years ago, the most popular songs read between a third and fourth grade level, but the inanity only increased with time, and after a five-year downward tumble ending in 2014 (the last year of the study), chart-topping hits had a reading level equivalent to second or third grade. Broken into genres, the levels measured just 2.6 for Hip-hop/R&B, a tie of 2.9 for Rock and Pop, and faring best was Country at 3.3 — though declaring a winner in this insipid race to the bottom seems somewhat defeatist. Even further to that point, the most intellectually stimulating song, Blake Shelton’s Country hit “All About Tonight”, measured just 5.8, while wading deeply into the ludicrous was Three Days Grace’s “The Good Life”, at a level equivalent to 0.8 — begging the question, did they have to try to craft lyrics a kindergartner could easily read?

So how did this happen and why is it getting even worse? For the sake of brevity, this is a systemic issue being reinforced across the board by pandemic anti-intellectualism. Some have argued there is no harm in a bit of mindless distraction, but this is incontrovertibly false. When just six corporations control 90% of the media, and 80% of radio stations have identical playlists, mindless content isn’t a choice — it’s a virtual mandate. In this self-propelled cycle of banality, the conglomerates dictate content to be promoted by radio, which in turn pushes it endlessly, creating a false perception that what is being played is due to listener demand. But this insidious marketing ploy is more akin to kidnapping and is every bit as dangerous.

There is a dearth in music options over the airwaves, so when vacuous lyrics are foisted on listeners, they become captives under duress. It is scientifically proven that flexing the intellect can slow cognitive decline, but there has been a cultural shift away from stimulating thought in favor of homogenization and living for the moment, and empty radio content is both symptom and reinforcement of that trend. Society is focused on entertainment, materialism, and self-promotion, and when coupled with a need for instant gratification, it’s really no wonder we’re in such a sorry state. Occasional forays into mindless distraction would be understandable and harmless if they were just forays, but the foundation is faulty due to a sharp decline in quality education at every level.

Education has become the highest form of indoctrination with teachers forced into regurgitating information so their students can pass tests rather than become innovators and original thinkers. And who could blame them? Currently, they’re held to the ridiculous system where their performance is ranked, and salary determined by how those students perform on standardized tests that are, themselves, flawed. As Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, put it, “This country has spent billions on accountability, not on the improvement of teaching and learning at the classroom level.”

An education system based almost solely on taking tests is not only intellectually dimming, it’s stressful — instructors doling out the tests are given a set of instructions for what to do when students vomit on their test booklets. All of this is designed to send students to college where the situation is perpetuated. According to Catherine Liu, a film and media studies professor at the University of California, “We don’t educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs.”

Listen: ‘Reagan’ by Killer Mike on Anti-Media

From a political standpoint, all this ‘dumbing down’ makes sense: indoctrination creates obedience. If music and culture focus on mindless diversion, and education lacks, well, education, then people lack the acuity necessary to question the absurdity of the system. Those who manage to liberate themselves from this mold and have the gumption to question official authority will find a cozy spot on the government’s watch list. So while we bemoan our country’s lack of intellectual prowess, it isn’t by a failure of design.

The author of aptly titled Idiot America, journalist Charles Pierce, thoroughly summed up the issue this way: “The rise of idiot America today represents–for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power–the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good.”

Unfortunately, if the lyrics study is a prognostic omen, the epidemic of idiocy will only get worse.

Rude Behavior Shown to be as Contagious as an Infectious Disease

Behavioral research shows how one act of rudeness affects many people.

Source: Rude Behavior Shown to be as Contagious as an Infectious Disease : Waking Times

Waking Times

Alex Pietrowski, Staff

November 28, 2015

When you see someone smiling or you hear laughter, you often can’t help but smile or laugh yourself. Now scientists from the University of Florida have shown that the same applies to certain non-aggressive negative behaviors, especially rudeness.

A series of several studies conducted by researchers Trevor Foulk, Andrew Woolum and Amir Erez has shown that the exhibition of rude behavior by an individual, activates concepts associated with rudeness in the minds of others. Those being targeted by rude manners and people witnessing such behavior are equally affected. Rudeness is contagious in this manner.

The research showed that once the mind is stimulated with negative concepts, a person is more likely to interpret subsequent actions as rude, even if they are ambiguous or benign, and one is more likely to act with malevolence during interactions with others, thus further infecting them with hostility and negativity.

The scientific study of the transmission of negative behavior is not new. In the 1960’s, the infamous Bobo doll experiment showed that children who observed adults act abusively towards a doll, were themselves abusive to the doll. What was different about this experiment, when compared to these recent studies, was that the behaviors were aggressive, including hitting with a mallet and yelling, and they were acted out by someone the subjects looked up to – an adult. Hence it can be said that children in the study were intentionally mimicking negative behavior because they were copying the adults.

In this case, however, Foulk and his colleagues studied low-intensity negative behaviors, such as rudeness, which are more common in everyday interactions.

First Study – Does Observing Rude Behavior Activate Concepts in the Mind Related to Rudeness

In one of the studies, the participants witnessed an exchange between an actor, who they perceived was a participant arriving late to the experiment. In the control condition, the experiment administrator dismissed the actor offering to reschedule. In the negative condition, the administrator rudely berated the actor. The study participants were then asked to complete a Lexical Decision Task (LDT) in which they decided as quickly as possible if a string of letters formed an actual word, ie. CHIKHEN. Here are the results:

Critically, some of the LDT words were friendly (e.g., helpful), some were aggressive (e.g., savage), and some were rude (e.g., tactless). Response times to the friendly and aggressive items were similar across conditions, but response times to the rude items were significantly faster for participants in the negative condition relative to the control condition.  People who watched a rude interaction had concepts about rudeness active in their mind, and thus were faster to respond to those concepts in the LDT. These findings suggest that exposure to rudeness seems to sensitize us to rude concepts in a way that is not intentional or purposeful, but instead happens automatically.

Second Study – Does Sensitivity to Rudeness Impact Social Behavior?

In another study, the researchers asked participants to play the role of an employee in a bookstore. The subjects watched a video with either a rude or polite interaction among coworkers, and then were asked to answer a customer email. The email was either polite, highly aggressive, or moderately rude. Here is what was discovered:

Notably, the type of video participants observed did not affect their responses to the neutral or aggressive emails; instead, the nature of those emails drove the response.

However, the type of video participants observed early in the study did affect their interpretation of and response to the rude email.  Those who had seen the polite video adopted a benign interpretation of the moderately rude email and delivered a neutral response, while those who had seen the rude video adopted a malevolent interpretation and delivered a hostile response.  Thus, observing rude behaviors, even those committed by coworkers or peers, resulted in greater sensitivity and heightened response to rudeness.

Third Study – Does Watching Rude Behavior Make Us More Obnoxious Towards Others?

This study consisted of a series of negotiation exercises among participants. After an initial negotiation, “the carrier” subject was sent into a new negotiation with a new partner.

As you might guess, participants who negotiated with a rude [initial] partner were in turn perceived as rude in their subsequent interaction with a new partner.  These “carriers” evoked feelings of anger and hostility in their new partners, and even incited vindictive behaviors.

Moreover, these effects of negative contagion were evident in negotiations that took place up to a week after the initial exposure, suggesting a fairly long infectious period for negative behaviors.

We often hear that laughter is infectious, but beware, so is obnoxious behavior. If social behaviors, especially negative ones, are in fact contagios in this way, then does that explain why our society seems to be trending towards greater meanness and callousness? More importantly, can this pattern be broken with awareness and mindfulness?

Read more articles from Alex Pietrowski.

About the Author

Alex Pietrowski is an artist and writer concerned with preserving good health and the basic freedom to enjoy a healthy lifestyle. He is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and Offgrid Outpost, a provider of storable food and emergency kits. Alex is an avid student of Yoga and life.

Sources:

– http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rude-behavior-spreads-like-a-disease/
 – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26121091
 – http://www.mockingbirdeducation.net/uploads/5/4/0/7/5407628/bandura_1961.pdf

Is evil a disease? ISIS and the neuroscience of brutality

It’s hard to understand how the Nazis, ISIS and other radical groups can turn ordinary people into brutal killers. But perhaps evil is a disease – one we can treat

Source: Is evil a disease? ISIS and the neuroscience of brutality | New Scientist

http://www.newscientist.com

By Laura Spinney

11 November 2015

It’s hard to understand how the Nazis, ISIS and other radical groups can turn ordinary people into brutal killers. But perhaps evil is a disease – one we can treat. This article was first published before the attacks in Paris on 13 November

Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters

WHY would an apparently normal young adult drop out of college and turn up some time later in a video performing a cold-blooded execution in the name of jihad? It’s a conundrum we have been forced to ponder ever since a group calling itself ISIS declared war on infidels. But 70 years ago we were asking something similar of guards in Nazi concentration camps – and, sadly, there have been plenty of opportunities to ponder the matter in between.

What turns an ordinary person into a killer? The idea that a civilised human being might be capable of barbaric acts is so alien that we often blame our animal instincts – the older, “primitive” areas of the brain taking over and subverting their more rational counterparts. But fresh thinking turns this long-standing explanation on its head. It suggests that people perform brutal acts because the “higher”, more evolved, brain overreaches. The set of brain changes involved has been dubbed Syndrome E – with E standing for evil.

In a world where ideological killings are rife, new insights into this problem are sorely needed. But reframing evil as a disease is controversial. Some believe it could provide justification for heinous acts or hand extreme organisations a recipe for radicalising more young people. Others argue that it denies the reality that we all have the potential for evil within us. Proponents, however, say that if evil really is a pathology, then society ought to try to diagnose susceptible individuals and reduce contagion. And if we can do that, perhaps we can put radicalisation into reverse, too.

The Srebrebica massacre was the worst in Europe since World War II

Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos

Following the second world war, the behaviour of guards in Nazi concentration camps became the subject of study, with some researchers seeing them as willing, ideologically driven executioners, others as mindlessly obeying orders. The debate was reignited in the mid-1990s in the wake of the Rwandan genocide and the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia. In 1996, The Lancet carried an editorial pointing out that no one was addressing evil from a biological point of view. Neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried, at the University of California, Los Angeles, decided to rise to the challenge.

In a paper published in 1997, he argued that the transformation of non-violent individuals into repetitive killers is characterised by a set of symptoms that suggests a common condition, which he called Syndrome E (see “Seven symptoms of evil“). He suggested that this is the result of “cognitive fracture”, which occurs when a higher brain region, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) – involved in rational thought and decision-making – stops paying attention to signals from more primitive brain regions and goes into overdrive.

“The set of brain changes has been dubbed Syndrome E – with E standing for evil”

The idea captured people’s imaginations, says Fried, because it suggested that you could start to define and describe this basic flaw in the human condition. “Just as a constellation of symptoms such as fever and a cough may signify pneumonia, defining the constellation of symptoms that signify this syndrome may mean that you could recognise it in the early stages.” But it was a theory in search of evidence. Neuroscience has come a long way since then, so Fried organised a conference in Paris earlier this year to revisit the concept.

At the most fundamental level, understanding why people kill is about understanding decision-making, and neuroscientists at the conference homed in on this. Fried’s theory starts with the assumption that people normally have a natural aversion to harming others. If he is correct, the higher brain overrides this instinct in people with Syndrome E. How might that occur?

Etienne Koechlin at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris was able to throw some empirical light on the matter by looking at people obeying rules that conflict with their own preferences. He put volunteers inside a brain scanner and let them choose between two simple tasks, guided by their past experience of which would be the more financially rewarding (paying 6 euros versus 4). After a while he randomly inserted rule-based trials: now there was a colour code indicating which of the two tasks to choose, and volunteers were told that if they disobeyed they would get no money.

Continue reading:

Is evil a disease? ISIS and the neuroscience of brutality | New Scientist

Political Billboards Now Scanning Your Face to Analyze Your Reaction – Seriously

Source: Political Billboards Now Scanning Your Face to Analyze Your Reaction – Seriously

http://www.blacklistednews.com

November 11, 2015

Source: Justin Gardner

 2016 presidential candidates have a new option in their quest to sway voters. “Neuropolitics” is the attempt to read your mind by scanning facial expressions and feeding them into an algorithm. Biofeedback—including heart rate, eye movements, and skin conditions—can  also be captured and used for political purposes and, perhaps one day, for government purposes.

The New York Times describes a recent example in Mexico City, where a Congressional candidate hired a company to deploy a digital billboard with a hidden camera. The billboard advertised for the candidate, but also scanned faces so the campaign could analyze facial expressions and tweak their message.

The technology has been used by politicians in several other countries, including Mexico, Poland, Colombia, and Turkey. The “taboo” that once characterized its use in the U.S. could vanish in the 2016 elections.

David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager, said the tools “would be new ground for political campaigns.”

Mr. Plouffe added: “The richness of this data compared to what is gathered today in testing ads or evaluating speeches and debates, which is the trusty old dial test and primitive qualitative methods, is hard to comprehend. It gets more to emotion, intensity and a more complex understanding of how people are reacting.”

But “the horrendous dial ratings on the bottom of televised presidential debates,” he said, referring to the real-time reactions of undecided voters shown on the television screen, “may now be replaced with the only thing worse: sweat, eye and cardiac monitoring measurements of key voter segments.”

Francisco Olvera Ruiz, the governor of the Mexican state of Hidalgo, is a big believer in using the technology for elections and government programs, saying, “In my government, we have utilized a variety of research tools and opinion studies to evaluate the efficacy of our governmental programs, communications and messages. Neuroscience research [is] especially valuable because it has allowed us to discover with more precision and objectivity what people think, perceive and feel.”

However, academics are accusing neuromarketers of peddling junk science.

“For the most part, I think that companies selling neuroscience-based market research tools are taking advantage of people’s natural tendency to think that measurements of the brain are somehow more ‘real’ than measurements of behavior,” said Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at Stanford University.

Nonetheless, those eager to gain the power and influence that comes with being an elected official won’t let academic skepticism get in the way. They say that brain waves, facial expressions and neurobiology give true insight into a voter’s feelings and opinions. Many voters are reluctant to say how they feel about a candidate, but campaigns feel they should be able to get around the voter’s choice to keep their thoughts to themselves.

Neuromarketing consultants are pushing their research in at least a dozen countries, including the United States. One firm said that it worked for a Hillary Clinton campaign, but a Clinton spokesman said they won’t talk about what methodologies they use or don’t use.

In 2016, be wary as you watch the candidates’ digital billboards. They may be watching you too.