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
Subliminal messages - for years science has wondered whether or not we could pick up on messages below the level of consciousness, and whether or not those messages could influence our behavior. While I believe the answer to both of those questions is an affirmative ‘yes,’ science hasn’t done much to demonstrate that this is possible. But we’re making progress.
Using fMRI, the study looked at whether an image you aren’t aware of — but one that reaches the retina — has an impact on brain activity in the primary visual cortex, part of the occipital lobe. Subjects’ brains did respond to the object even when they were not conscious of having seen it.
Dr Bahador Bahrami, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the UCL Department of Psychology, said: “What’s interesting here is that your brain does log things that you aren’t even aware of and can’t ever become aware of. We show that there is a brain response in the primary visual cortex to subliminal images that attract our attention — without us having the impression of having seen anything. These findings point to the sort of impact that subliminal advertising may have on the brain. What our study doesn’t address is whether this would then influence you to go out and buy a product. I believe that it’s likely that subliminal advertising may affect our decisions — but that is just speculation at this point.”
Read: ScienceDaily: Subliminal Advertising Leaves Its Mark On The Brain (via son of parnas)
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
Free online book about authoritarians & those who follow them.
Read: The Authoritarians
This is a fascinating article that demonstrates how 15 minutes of positive affirmations can help under-achieving minority groups get better grades in school for the rest of the year.
Read: A fifteen-minute exercise may help overcome a lifetime of racial stereotyping (via Mind Hacks)
You know that cereal commercial where they give it to Mikey because he hates everything? There’s a powerful social message there. It turns out that we trust the opinions of people who like the things we like more than the opinion of people who dislike the things we also dislike.
Researchers theorize that this is because if we like something, we tend to like everything about it, but if someone dislikes it, we’re never sure exactly why. Maybe this is a lesson for all the Mikeys of the world - people will trust you more if you like more things.
Source: The Power Of Love
Perception is weird. You know that scene in The Matrix where they’re asking “Wow do you know what chicken tastes like? What if they didn’t know what chicken tasted like, which is why it tastes like everything.” Turns out, we’re actually like that. Our perception of taste is influenced not just by the smell or texture of a food, but by the color as well. I’m sure this is no surprise to gourmet chefs who prepare food that’s nice to look at as well as nice to eat, but it is a little odd that we wouldn’t notice existing changes because two items are the same color.
Maybe the real difference between Coke & Pepsi is that Coke tastes like it came out of a red can & Pepsi tastes like it came out of a blue can.
Given two cups of the same Tropicana orange juice, with one cup darkened with food coloring, the members of the researcher’s sample group perceived differences in taste that did not exist. However, when given two cups of orange juice that were the same color, with one cup sweetened with sugar, the same people failed to perceive taste differences.
Read: More Than Meets The Tongue
Whenever I watch game shows and they ask people inane questions and they can’t get them, I never assume they’re idiots. Plenty of people have a hard time remembering things under pressure. Now we know that people have a hard time remembering things in most social situations.
Researchers from Indiana University found that people in a group setting exposed to brand information - such as an ad for Pizza Hut — have a hard time recalling the brand’s competitors. In other words, being around friends when deciding where to order takeout might cause you to forget completely about that local pizza place you’ve been wanting to try.
Being Around Friends Can Impair Your Memory
Since I’m devilishly handsome and there’s nothing I can do about that, my usual pickup line of “Wanna see my yacht” may actually backfire long-term since it turns out that women don’t think men who are both handsome and rich are good husband material. Go figure.
We asked females to rate a number of different males in terms of attractiveness as a long-term partner. Females were presented with attractive, average and unattractive male faces paired with lonely-hearts advertisements implying high, medium or low socio-economic status. Highest ratings were consistently given to attractive males of medium status rather than high status. We suggest that females see physically attractive, high status males as being more likely to pursue a mating strategy rather than parenting strategy. Under particular circumstances, high socio-economic status in males can be subtly counter-productive in terms of attractiveness as a long-term partner.
read: Too good to be ‘true’? The handicap of high socio-economic status in attractive males (via BPS Research Digest)
(Perhaps someone needs to tell this short film maker. And these Lesbians.)
Telling your child (or perhaps anyone) that they’re smart could be far more disastrous than anyone suspected. Children that are told they’re smart stop applying effort. Having to work hard at something become something that the smart kids shouldn’t have to do, and don’t do, and fear of failure prevents them from trying.
I was constantly told I was smart growing up. By my parents, schoolteachers, other students. Everyone. Being smart is part of my identity. It’s kind of scary to think that this is the source of the “genius slacker” archetype.
“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
Praise isn’t always effective, and praise isn’t always enough. Self-esteem isn’t a good predictor of success, but real feedback can help people make changes. The key isn’t to give general praise, or make people think they can’t improve (because their intelligence is innate), but to give the kind of praise & criticism that can lead to specific changes in behavior & improvement.
sources: The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids , Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Eduction alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. — Calvin Coolidge 1872
