Utterly fascinating article about the use & abuse of power, disproportionate access to resources based on chance, rules, and individual will. All told through the eyes of 3rd graders playing with Lego.
Children dug through hefty-sized bins of Legos, sought “cool pieces,” and bartered and exchanged until they established a collection of homes, shops, public facilities, and community meeting places. We carefully protected Legotown from errant balls and jump ropes, and watched it grow day by day.
After nearly two months of observing the children’s Legotown construction, we decided to ban the Legos.
Read: Why We Banned Legos - Volume 21 No. 2 - Winter 2006 - Rethinking Schools Online
If you haven’t seen Quiet Rage about the Stanford Prison Experiment, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. The price tag may be step, but if you’re at all interested in the psychology of compliance and want to know how atrocities could be committed by ordinary people in the name of justice, this movie will leave a lasting impression.
This isn’t the first time Philip Zimbardo criticized the Bush Administration for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, but it’s significant because Philip Zimbardo is retiring this year. One of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century, Philip Zimbardo will be missed.
The retiring psychology professor who ran the famed Stanford Prison Experiment savagely criticized the Bush administration’s War on Terror Wednesday and said senior government officials should be tried for crimes against humanity.
In his final lecture at Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo said abuses committed by Army reservists at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison weren’t isolated incidents by rogue soldiers. Rather, sadism was the inevitable result of U.S. government policies that condone brutality toward enemies, he said.
Read: cbs5.com - ‘Psychology Of Evil’ Prof’s Last Stanford Lecture
Politics is a fascinating area for me - massive PR campaigns designed to sway millions of people to a certain ideological viewpoint. A viewpoint that those who are doing the persuading may or may not actually hold, but which they espouse because that’s what the people they’re trying to influence want their leaders to espouse. Here is a meta-study that attempts to tease out what political conservativism is all about, at its core.
Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:
* Fear and aggression
* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
* Uncertainty avoidance
* Need for cognitive closure
* Terror management
“From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination,” the researchers wrote in an article, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” recently published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Bulletin.
Read: Researchers help define what makes a political conservative