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The Rise of the New Groupthink

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Susan Cain - Jan. 15 (Opinion) - Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

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Police: Iraq War Veteran Suspected Of Killing Park Ranger Found Dead

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - Jan. 03 (News Report) - A plane searching the remote wilderness for Benjamin Colton Barnes, 24, on Monday discovered his body lying partially submerged in an icy, snowy mountain creek with snow banks standing several feet high on either side.

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The New York Times Discovers It’s Virtually Impossible To Keep Weight Off

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Slate - By L. V. Anderson - Dec. 29 (Opinion) - With New Year’s and its attendant resolutions just around the corner, articles about weight loss are cropping up in all the usual places (i.e., everywhere you look). One of the most comprehensive and personal essays on the topic can be found in this week

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Fact-checking in the Echo Chamber Nation

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

PolitiFact - By Bill Adair - Dec. 23 (Opinion) - At a Republican campaign rally a few years ago, I asked one of the attendees how he got his news. "I listen to Rush and read NewsMax," he said. "And to make sure I'm getting a balanced view, I watch Fox." My liberal friends get their information from distinctly different sources — Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Rachel Maddow. To make sure they get a balanced view, they click Facebook links — from their liberal friends. This is life in our echo chamber nation. We protect ourselves from opinions we don't like and seek reinforcement from like-minded allies. The paradox ...

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The Psychology Of Nakedness

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By Jonah Lehrer - Nov. 30 (Special Report) - The human mind sees minds everywhere. Show us a collection of bouncing balls and we hallucinate agency; a glance at a stuffed animal and we endow it with a mood; I’m convinced Siri doesn’t like me. The point is that we are constantly translating our visual perceptions into a theory of mind, as we attempt to imagine the internal states of teddy bears, microchips and perfect strangers.

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The Limits of Magical Thinking

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Maureen Dowd - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - Steve Jobs, the mad perfectionist, even perfected his stare. He wanted it to be hypnotic. He wanted the other person to blink first. He wanted it to be, like Dracula’s saturnine gaze, a force that could bend your will to his and subsume your reality

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How to stop the political insanity

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - Oct. 07 (Opinion) -

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Stockbrokers More Competitive, Willing To Take Risks Than Psychopaths

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - Sep. 27 (Research) - Various studies have suggested that a certain kind of psychological profile gravitates toward the fast-paced, high-pressure environment of the trading floor -- and that this profile probably has more than a little in common with psychopathic personality, a clinical condition marked by gregariousness, impulsiveness, dishonesty and lack of empathy.

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Why Do They Do It?

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

FactCheck - By Brooks Jackson - Sep. 16 (Opinion) - Why do politicians persist in peddling exaggerations, twisted facts and outright falsehoods? Here's a theory from a veteran political reporter. Jon Keller of WBZ in Boston offered up his explanation in his "Keller @ Large" commentary for Sept. 15. It was prompted by our coverage of the recent Republican presidential candidates' debate and our criticism of President Obama's jobs speech. We were flattered by the nice mention, of course. But what really caught our attention was Keller's conclusion: Jon Keller, Sept. 15: The president and all his allies and enemies have one thing in common — they frequently cite and repeat falsehoods that reflect, at best, sloppiness and carelessness, and, at worst, outright dishonesty. Why do they think they can get away with this reprehensible behavior? Because we do it all the time ourselves. We repeat gossip and rumor, forward garbage e-mails, and convince ourselves that falsehoods which fit our world view are actually the truth. So I’m wondering – why would we expect the people who represent us to not reflect us in this way as well? We see evidence of that every day at FactCheck.org. Readers forward to us an endless stream of chain emails they have received containing false claims. The emails come from family, friends or acquaintances who either don't know that they are repeating falsehoods, or don't care. Some of these messages have been circulating for years, despite being debunked by us and often by other myth-busting sites as well. So do we, the public, get the politicians we deserve? That's a question worth pondering before sending on that viral email that so perfectly confirms your opinions, but which you haven't really checked out for factual accuracy.

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With great graphs comes great responsibility

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Ezra Klein - Sep. 13 (News Report) - Want to convince someone of something? Show them a graph. At least, that’s what political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler found in a series of experiments testing the best ways to correct factual misinformation. Key quote: “Graphical corrections are also found to successfully reduce incorrect beliefs among potentially resistant subjects and to perform better than an equivalent textual correction.” Full paper — with graphs — here (pdf). ...

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The Republicans are now the anti-science party

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Sep. 04 (Opinion) - Jon Huntsman Jr, a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn't a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that's too bad, because Mr Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the Republican party in the United States, namely, that it is becoming the "anti-science party". This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us. To see what Mr Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the Republican nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

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What Happened to Obama?

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Drew Westen - Aug. 07 (Opinion) - The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.

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8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Bruce E. Levine - Aug. 01 (Opinion) - The ruling elite has created social institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance.

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I Counseled All My Clients To Plead Insanity

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Common Dreams - By Christopher Cooper - Jul. 29 (Opinion) - if Breivik is crazy, a great many Americans and most of the big boys in D.C. Are crazy. But if the Norwegian shooter-bomber is sane, and culpable and should be tried and sentenced (and most would suggest executed, I imagine), then we had better get started drafting juries and hiring judges because our list of mass-murderers is a long and bipartisan one.

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Debt Ceiling Holy War: Why Do Conservatives Have Unshakable Faith in Ideas That Are Totally, Demonstrably False? | | AlterNet

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Chauncey DeVega - Jul. 18 (News Analysis) - The Republican Party is holding the U.S. economy hostage. While the American people overwhelmingly support a solution to the debt ceiling impasse that includes a mix of tax hikes on the rich and cuts to the federal budget, the Tea Party GOP is deaf to their concerns.

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Teaching Empathy to the ‘Me’ Generation

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Miller-McCune - By Eric Leake - Jul. 18 (Special Report) - A Midwestern university experiments in teaching empathy not merely through classroom curriculum, but by having students live the lives of the working poor. The six participating students and their community partners are introduced in turn. Diana Crandall, a first-year psychology major in a smart black jacket and tie, talks about the children she worked with through the Children’s Hunger Alliance. “I know that I can’t walk away from this and be the same person I was before.”

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Mass Psychosis in the US

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Aljazeera - Jul. 13 (Special Report) - Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

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The Power Of Pull

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Alex Rampell - Jul. 03 (Opinion) - What makes email, Facebook, and Google so valuable? Answer: Visiting them is largely unprompted, notwithstanding the synapses that fire in your brain that make you check your email, your Facebook feed, or decide to research something on Google. In other words, people pull content themselves, rather than having that content be pushed — or foisted — upon them. The best way of looking at consumer web applications is as a complex stack of “pulls” and “pushes.” Lest these terms be confused with an earlier generation of push: a “pull” is an unsolicited action by a consumer, whereas a “push” is a solicitation by a seller/producer. The consumer ultimately “pulls” from a mobile phone or computer. Everything else is “pushed” to the consumer, through ads, e-mails or other marketing efforts from companies eager to get business and traffic.

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The Optimism Bias

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Time - By Ali Sharot - Jul. 02 (Special Report) - We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We watch our backs, weigh the odds, pack an umbrella. But both neuroscience and social science suggest that we are more optimistic than realistic. On average, we expect things to turn out better than they wind up being. People hugely underestimate their chances of getting divorced, losing their job or being diagnosed with cancer; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; envision themselves achieving more than their peers; and overestimate their likely life span (sometimes by 20 years or more). The belief that the future will be much better than the past and present is known as the optimism bias. It abides in every race, region and socioeconomic bracket. Schoolchildren playing when-I-grow-up are rampant optimists, but so are grownups: a 2005 study found that adults over 60 are just as likely to see the glass half full as young adults.

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Argument, Truth and the Social Side of Reasoning

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Gary Gutting - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - In a recent discussion about reasoning, one point was overlooked: Knowledge of the truth is a social process. Philosophers rightly think of themselves as experts on reasoning. After all, it was a philosopher, Aristotle, who developed the science of logic. But psychologists have also had some interesting things to say about the subject. A fascinating paper by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier has recently generated a lot of discussion.

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Don't Look on the Bright Side: Pessimism, Not Magical Thinking, Is What Will Save Us

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Marty Kaplan - Jun. 29 (Opinion) - Whatever global threats scare you -- climate change, the Middle East, loose nukes, pandemics -- and whatever domestic issues haunt you -- failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, rising poverty, obesity -- the odds are that the honesty, discipline, resources and burden-sharing required for a happy ending will not, like Elijah, show up at our door.

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PTSD Affecting U.S. Soldiers More Than British

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Miller-McCune - By Michael Scott Moore - Jun. 23 (Research) - Combat stress is still a murky and sometimes taboo element of soldiering, but one of the strangest discoveries is that the strain isn’t evenly spread among vets from different countries. For example: A far higher percentage of American soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder after combat in Iraq and Afghanistan than British soldiers do.

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Why Do We Fight? Blame It on Our Brains.

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Katherine Rosma - Jun. 19 (Opinion) - My husband is smart. Super smart. Like, not only does he devour fat history books, but he can talk about them in an engaging manner that's neither stuffy nor oversimplified. He's good with numbers, too. And he knows the meaning of Latin root words -- a big turn-on to a crossword-puzzle addict like me. (He had me at salve.) love his brain. It's Joe's dominant quadrants I could do without. Recently, I got absolutely walloped by his lower left.

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The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - Jun. 10 (News Analysis) - Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known “chemical imbalance.” However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a

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Are We Ruled by Second-String Psychopaths?

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By David Schwartz - Jun. 08 (Opinion) - How had our country disappeared? Vonnegut proposed that among the contributing factors was that it had been invaded – as if by the Martians – by people with a particularly frightening mental illness. People with this illness were termed psychopaths. (The term nowadays is anti-social personality disorder.) These are terms for people who are smart, personable, and engaging, but who have no consciences. They are not guided by a sense of right or wrong. They seem to be unaffected by the feelings of others, including feelings of distress caused by their actions. Straying from a decent way of treating people, or violating ethical codes causes no anxiety, the anxiety which is what causes the rest of us to moderate our more greedy impulses.

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