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Posts tagged psychology
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By Sam Anderson
April 4, 2012
Humans have always played stupid games. Dice are older than recorded history. Ancient Egyptians played a board game called Senet, which archaeologists believe was something like sacred backgammon. We have rock-paper-scissors, tick-tack-toe, checkers, dominoes and solitaire — small, abstract games in which sets of simple rules play out in increasingly complex scenarios. (Chess, you might say, is the king of stupid games: the tide line where stupid games meet genius.)
But pre-Tetris games were different in a primal way. They required human opponents or at least equipment — the manipulation of three-dimensional objects in space. When you sat down to play them, chances were you meant to sit down and play them.
Stupid games, on the other hand, are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits … [Indie game designer Zach Gage told me] “I mean, I really like the Internet and what it’s done for games — it’s been amazing. But in so many ways it’s just terrible. Arcade cabinets did a lot of things that were really smart that we never gave them credit for. There’s a lot of social psychology embedded in that structure.” The Xbox, he explained, offered only a few games designed to be played along with other people in the same room. “No one is designing games like that anymore,” he said. “It’s very terrible.”
Until recently we’ve only been able to speculate about story’s persuasive effects. But over the last several decades psychology has begun a serious study of how story affects the human mind. Results repeatedly show that our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by story. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence.
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(Source: or-so-i-feel.blogspot.com)
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I’m currently reading:
BEAUTIFUL SOULS: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times
Eyal Press
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“In his book Obeying Orders, the legal scholar Mark J. Osiel argues that soldiers steeped in traditional notions of military honor are more likely to resist unjust orders than conscripts with more jaundiced attitudes. He cites the case of an officer who learned of a recruit caught aiming his gun at the head of a Vietnamese woman and snapped, ‘Marines don’t do that.’ In Osiel’s view, professional pride and military idealism may prove a more effective constraint on soldiers thrust into morally compromising situations than abstract legal norms.”—Eyal Press, Beautiful Souls, p. 94
Emphasis mine.
![theatlantic:
Can Dogs Catch Yawns from Humans?
This story starts with a 2008 paper in Biology Letters titled rather wonderfully, “Dogs catch human yawns.” Well, actually it started when my cat yawned and then I yawned and I wondered if animals could pass a yawn to me like a fellow human could. Spoiler: there’s no evidence that cats can cause you to yawn. My alternative yawn hypothesis for yesterday’s false yawn contagion is that sIeeping five hours a night causes me to yawn frequently and being a kitten causes my kitten to yawn frequently. Therefore, it is not surprising that we yawned in quick succession.But anyway, back to the paper. Its authors, Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni, Atsushi Senju and Alex Shepherd were familiar with the literature about contagious yawning. And yes, there is a surprisingly rich literature about the phenomenon where one person yawning causes another person to do the same. Some conjecture that this is an empathic response because there is a relationship between “the susceptibility to contagious yawning and self-reported scores of empathy” and also because individuals on the autism spectrum do not catch yawns from other people. But humans don’t seem to be the only animals that feed off the emotions of others. Dogs, some argue, might feel something like empathy. So, if empathy causes contagious yawning and dogs appear to feel empathy for humans, then perhaps dogs can catch our yawns.
Read more. [Image: miguelmichan/Flickr]
Editor’s note: If I owned this yawning dog, I’d name him Charles Barkley.
I stifled one yawn and had to give in to the next just reading this.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1pc6f1qpz1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Can Dogs Catch Yawns from Humans?
This story starts with a 2008 paper in Biology Letters titled rather wonderfully, “Dogs catch human yawns.” Well, actually it started when my cat yawned and then I yawned and I wondered if animals could pass a yawn to me like a fellow human could. Spoiler: there’s no evidence that cats can cause you to yawn. My alternative yawn hypothesis for yesterday’s false yawn contagion is that sIeeping five hours a night causes me to yawn frequently and being a kitten causes my kitten to yawn frequently. Therefore, it is not surprising that we yawned in quick succession.
But anyway, back to the paper. Its authors, Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni, Atsushi Senju and Alex Shepherd were familiar with the literature about contagious yawning. And yes, there is a surprisingly rich literature about the phenomenon where one person yawning causes another person to do the same. Some conjecture that this is an empathic response because there is a relationship between “the susceptibility to contagious yawning and self-reported scores of empathy” and also because individuals on the autism spectrum do not catch yawns from other people.
But humans don’t seem to be the only animals that feed off the emotions of others. Dogs, some argue, might feel something like empathy. So, if empathy causes contagious yawning and dogs appear to feel empathy for humans, then perhaps dogs can catch our yawns.Read more. [Image: miguelmichan/Flickr]
Editor’s note: If I owned this yawning dog, I’d name him Charles Barkley.
I stifled one yawn and had to give in to the next just reading this.
240 notes (via theatlantic)
The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever | Wired Magazine
By Jonah Lehrer
February 17, 2012
[Critical Incident Stress Debriefing] CISD rarely helps—and recent studies show it often makes things worse. In one, burn victims were randomly assigned to receive either CISD or no treatment at all. A year later, those who went through a debriefing were more anxious and depressed and nearly three times as likely to suffer from PTSD. Another trial showed CISD was ineffective at preventing post-traumatic stress in victims of violent crime, and a US Army study of 952 Kosovo peacekeepers found that debriefing did not hasten recovery and led to more alcohol abuse. Psychologists have begun to recommend that the practice be discontinued for disaster survivors … As a treatment, CISD misapprehends how memory works. It suggests that the way to get rid of a bad memory, or at a minimum denude it of its negative emotional connotations, is to talk it out … This mistaken notion has been around for thousands of years. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time—Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today—but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.None of this is true. In the past decade, scientists have come to realize that our memories are not inert packets of data and they don’t remain constant. Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all. When CISD fails, it fails because, as scientists have recently learned, the very act of remembering changes the memory itself. New research is showing that every time we recall an event, the structure of that memory in the brain is altered in light of the present moment, warped by our current feelings and knowledge. That’s why pushing to remember a traumatic event so soon after it occurs doesn’t unburden us; it reinforces the fear and stress that are part of the recollection.
Work is no longer a secure base, but rather a source of anxiety and indignity, both a matter of life and death and utterly meaningless, overwhelming and yet so insubstantial it could run through our fingers. It is normal to feel under threat and undervalued, to feel snivellingly grateful to have a job, any job. We must be sure not to take work for granted and yet be willing to be taken for granted ourselves.
-Ivor Southwood on knowledge work and temping
Excerpted from The New Inquiry Magazine, No. 1: Precarity
67 notes (via amyweber & thenewinquiry)
![The psychology of color for web designers (via The psychology of color for web designers [infographic] - Holy Kaw!)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxth7kc7nq1qzok36o1_500.jpg)
The psychology of color for web designers (via The psychology of color for web designers [infographic] - Holy Kaw!)
By Dave Goodsmith
January 13, 2012
1) Memory: This is your brain on-line. We mean, this, right now, what you’re reading. It’s your brain. On-line.
According to Columbia neuroscientist Betsy Sparrow and her team, “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools”. When participants in Dr. Sparrow’s studies thought a fact was saved somewhere accessible, they’d forget it … So is offloading our brain making us dumber? Not according to rising edusoftware giant Knewton’s David Kuntz:
“Accessibility [of information] changes the relative importance of certain topics in much the same ways that a calculator changes the relative importance of some things.”
