The third-person effect hypothesis states that a person exposed to a persuasive communication in the mass media sees it as having a greater effect on others than on himself or herself (Davison, 1983). This is known as the perceptual hypothesis, but there is also a behavioral hypothesis predicting that perceiving others as more vulnerable increases support for restrictions on mass media.
Wikipedia
I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
From an unpublished paper I'm editing:
High self-monitors tend to engage in several activities in different specialized social systems, and they will play different roles and tailor their self-presentation behaviors to suit the specialized situation, whereas low self-monitors tend to take part in many activities in the same social system, which is often homogeneous and well-suited to their personalities (Snyder & Gangestad, 1982). This shows that high self-monitors prefer to play diverse social roles in a segmented social world, while low self-monitors are more likely have more uniform oneRelated:
The cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, and very deep encounter with physical reality.
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From this point of view, what can make bits have meaning is that their patterns have been hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren't really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a nonabstract continuation of reality.Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto
The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation. On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture. On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species. On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet. Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales. That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature. In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet. If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.Freeman Dyson: From Eros To Gaia, p. 341, via Warren Senders: Eight Thoughts About Timescale
...the non-fundamental ontology of everyday life (solids and fluids) can seem as a kind of "coarse-grained" macroscopic approximation to the more fundamental microscopic ontology of quarks and electrons; indeed, the former should be (at least in principle) derivable as a logical consequence of the underlying fundamental theory.
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...it means that what appear in the older theory to be a fundamental entity is, in reality, a non-fundamental entity derivable as a "coarse-grained: version of something deeper.
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In this view, reality is composed of a hierarchy of "scales"... The theory on each scale emerges from the theory on the next finer-scale by ignoring some of the (irrelevant) details of the latter. And the ontology of the theory on each scale - in particular, its "unobservable" theoretical entities - can be understood, at least in principle, as arising from the "collective" or "emergent" effects of a more fundamental theory at a finer scale.Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax, p242-54
...the deeper we probe into the nature of things, the stranger they tend to look. That is not surprising: the deeper we probe into the nature of things, the farther we stray from the intuitions about macroscopic objects (and about human psychology, etc.) that were sculpted into our brains by natural selection.Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax, p240
Various complex personal / admin issues to deal with, so best not to do this until they're resolved, but a nice passage in a recent NY Times article on touch:
A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”
We think that humans build relationships precisely for this reason, to distribute problem solving across brains,” said James A. Coan, a a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “We are wired to literally share the processing load, and this is the signal we’re getting when we receive support through touch.”
You can't sneak a peek, because of all the face we're most set up to spot the eyes. The importance of sunglasses in certain situations is thus beyond measure. Nobody knows what I see and nobody knows what I'm thinking.
I sit in public and watch what people show of themselves, amazed that any of us leave the house. Going naked would be only marginally more revealing.
Related paper: The eyes have it! Reflexive orienting is triggered by nonpredictive gaze.
monkey troubleBackground
Political elections are dominance competitions. When men win a dominance competition, their testosterone levels rise or remain stable to resist a circadian decline; and when they lose, their testosterone levels fall. However, it is unknown whether this pattern of testosterone change extends beyond interpersonal competitions to the vicarious experience of winning or losing in the context of political elections. Women's testosterone responses to dominance competition outcomes are understudied, and to date, a clear pattern of testosterone changes in response to winning and losing dominance competitions has not emerged.
Methodology/Principal Findings
The present study investigated voters' testosterone responses to the outcome of the 2008 United States Presidential election. 183 participants provided multiple saliva samples before and after the winner was announced on Election Night. The results show that male Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome testosterone levels, whereas testosterone levels dropped in male John McCain and Robert Barr voters (losers). There were no significant effects in female voters.
Conclusions/Significance
The findings indicate that male voters exhibit biological responses to the realignment of a country's dominance hierarchy as if they participated in an interpersonal dominance contest.Dominance, Politics, and Physiology: Voters' Testosterone Changes on the Night of the 2008 United States Presidential Election [full paper]
The theory of self-deception was foreshadowed by the sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, which disputed the romantic notion that behind the masks we show other people is the one true self. No, said Goffman; it's masks all the way down. Many discoveries in the ensuing decades have borne him out.Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p264
Osaka cab viewPrevious research has shown that cultural differences exist in the susceptibility of making fundamental attribution error: people from individualistic cultures are prone to the error while people from collectivistic cultures commit less of it. ...
These discrepancies in the salience of different factors to people from different cultures suggest that Asians tend to attribute behavior to situation while Westerners attribute the same behavior to the actor. ... One explanation for this difference in attribution lies in the way people of different cultural orientation perceive themselves in the environment. Particularly, Markus and Kitayama (1991) mentioned how (individualistic) Westerners tend to see themselves as independent agents and therefore prone themselves to individual objects rather than contextual details.Excerpted, cut and pasted from Wikipedia
There are some things some people shouldn't read, and I shouldn't be allowed near any version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I tend to go through the check-lists feeling like someone has just read my soul. The other week I decided that I had avoidant personality disorder, and so brooded on that for a while, then decided to go out and test the hypothesis. I came home at sunrise convinced that I'm a narcissistic psychopath instead /as well.
Earlier in the evening, my body chemistry still to be trusted and the alcohol only slightly sedating inhibitions, when the loggorhea hadn't yet kicked in and I was still capable of listening, I introduced myself to a guy and he said "Oh, I know about you", which was a surprise, as apart from the last six months I've spent the last three years being fairly reclusive, too busy working early in the morning / late at night to haunt bars and hang out in conversation.
He used to share an apartment with one of my exes, and then another place with a girl I used to know in another town. I said "oh, you must know a lot of bad things about me."
I didn't feel this was being self-deprecating at all. I think I exist very little in the minds of others, which is A-OK and how things should be around here, but am aware that most likely when I do appear in conversations in the third person that the proportion of anecdotes + punchlines to fond memories is fairly high. This is something which I've been trying to address, although my attempts seem to end in anecdotes and punchlines.
But the guy said, "no, not at all, only good things," and that was cool. Then he asked me if it was true that I'd once tied myself to a bed when taking an exotic hallucinogen for the first time, alone.
Later in the evening, almost sunrise, I possessed by the spirit of Randy Pan the Goat-boy. I have no idea how this went across, but badly, I suspect.
The pratfall effect is a psychological phenomenon whereby the attractiveness of a person perceived as competent increases if the person commits a blunder. Conversely, the attractiveness of a person perceived as incompetent decreases if the person commits a blunder.Wikipedia....an experiment by Kay Deaux demonstrates that the pratfall effect applies most strongly to males. She found that, although most males in her study preferred the highly competent man who committed a blunder, women showed a tendency to prefer the highly competent nonblunderer, regardless of whether the stimulus person was male or female. Similarly, my colleagues and I found that males with a moderate degree of self-esteem are most likely to prefer the highly competent person who commits a blunder, while males with low self-esteem (who apparently feel little competitiveness with the stimulus person) prefer the highly competent person who doesn't blunder. It should be emphasized that no sizable proportion of people-regardless of their own level of self-esteem-preferred the mediocre person.Elliot Aronson The Social Animal [via here - link contains a longer account of the original experiment]
