Science of the SpiritS


Compass

Scientific explanation for 'libtards'? Conservatives have more complex moral compass than liberals

Emily Esfahani Smith
Washington Times
Tue, 26 Jun 2012 13:28 UTC
haidt righteous mind
In 2004, Jonathan Haidt had an experience that changed his intellectual life.

The influential moral and social psychologist - at the time an atheist and a liberal - was at the Strand, a used-book shop in New York, when the brown spine of a book called Conservatism caught his eye. Edited by historian Jerry Z. Muller, it was an anthology of readings from David Hume to Philip Rieff.

Three pages into the book, Mr. Haidt was floored - that is, sitting on the ground of the bookstore - paging through "all these gems of insight on the relationship between human flourishing and society," the spirited 48-year-old academic recalled over tea and chocolate in his office at New York University's Stern School of Business.

Its passages from Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek and Winston Churchill confirmed Mr. Haidt's empirical research about the limits of rationalism, human nature's flaws, the necessity of social institutions and the value of the sacred. That confirmation was surprising to the man who, frustrated by the presidential election defeat of John F. Kerry in 2004, entered the field of political psychology to "help liberals win."

Before stumbling across the Muller anthology, the popular former University of Virginia psychology professor thought of conservatism as a "Frankenstein monster," he says - an ugly mishmash of Christian fundamentalism, racism and authoritarianism.

Comment: For more on Haidt and his work, check this out.

Here's a TED talk he gave back in 2008:



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Brain

Neural activity pattern Study: Your brain reveals who your friends are


Media Press
Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
First-year graduate students social network survey
© Carolyn Parkinson.Social network. The social network of an entire cohort of first-year graduate students was reconstructed based on a survey completed by all students in the cohort (N = 279; 100% response rate). Nodes indicate students; lines indicate mutually reported social ties between them. A subset of students (orange circles; N = 42) participated in the fMRI study.
You may perceive the world the way your friends do, according to a Dartmouth study finding that friends have similar neural responses to real-world stimuli and these similarities can be used to predict who your friends are.

The researchers found that you can predict who people are friends with just by looking at how their brains respond to video clips. Friends had the most similar neural activity patterns, followed by friends-of-friends who, in turn, had more similar neural activity than people three degrees removed (friends-of-friends-of-friends).

Published in Nature Communications, the study is the first of its kind to examine the connections between the neural activity of people within a real-world social network, as they responded to real-world stimuli, which in this case was watching the same set of videos.
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People 2

Study shows partners of people who are conscientious also have better health


PsyBlog
Thu, 01 Feb 2018 11:08 UTC
partner
Having a conscientious partner is best for one's health, research finds.

A conscientious partner also tends to have more stable relationships.

That is quite apart from the benefit of living with someone who can hold down a job and who puts the bins out.

Professor Brent Roberts, the study's first author, said:
"Highly conscientious people are more organized and responsible and tend to follow through with their obligations, to be more impulse controlled and to follow rules."
Conscientious people are also more likely to exercise, less likely to smoke or take drugs or dangerous risks.

Comment: See also:

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Snakes in Suits

Physically attractive people more likely to fall on the right and be engaged in politics, says study


Sputnik
Thu, 01 Feb 2018 20:33 UTC
people outside
© Sputnik/ Vladimir Sergeev
Good-looking individuals are more likely to have right-wing political views than less physically attractive people, according to a university study.

The authors of the report, Rolfe D. Peterson from the US Susquehanna University and Carl L. Palmer from the Illinois State University, examined the connection between physical attractiveness and political beliefs, applying multiple surveys measuring people's attractiveness.

"More attractive individuals are more politically efficacious than their peers and more likely to identify as conservative and Republican than less physically attractive citizens of comparable demographic backgrounds," the report read.
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Butterfly

Anxiety, anguish, anger: What it feels like to survive a collapse - and how to work on it

J.G. Martinez D
The Organic Prepper
Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
collapse
Hello to all those readers interested in learning from my personal experience of surviving an economic collapse.

I decided to write this article, the first of a series of several similar that will be posted because I am experiencing a huge emotional mix these days. I am not embarrassed in any way for this, I am a normal person, I have feelings and emotions like everyone else, and until not long ago I had a home, a job, and a conventional, peaceful life like perhaps many of you are enjoying right now.

May God keep it that way!

As a former oil worker, one learns to control emotions, because being in this business, a bad decision in the field if there is danger present, could cost one's life. Or someone else's. This said, when we made the decision (as a family we discuss all this of course) and, once my salary stopped being useful for three weeks worth of food, we decided that was the inflection point. After 14 years in one of the most profitable industries in the world (except in Venezuela), I was left with nothing in my bank account. The hyperinflation ate away all the little money that was there. The next step, fleeing to a foreign country (yes, I had savings in hard currency) and trying to find some stability was relatively easy, as my sister-in-law and mother-in-law were already here, and they had some space. So I started a small business (mainly private lectures) just to meet the ends, and it became more or less profitable. A phone call every two days to home, to speak with my family, and long, newspaper-like emails, social networks sometimes. (We decided to not disclose my departure because of OPSEC).
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Caesar

Putin shares what keeps his spirit up

Louis Heyward
Russia Insider
Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
Super Putin
Jeb Bush should be taking notes ...

A human moment during the grueling workdays that has the whole country wondering how he keeps it up ...

In the following clip, (with transcript include below) he is questioned as to what keeps him so energetic, and reveals his driving motivation.


Comment: It is surely no coincidence that President Putin has similar insights as Jordan Peterson.

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Books

Discarded treasures: Why we forget most of the books we read

Julie Beck
The Atlantic
Fri, 26 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
Books
© John Frederick Peto / GettyDiscarded Treasures
Pamela Paul's memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. "I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object," says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. "I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don't remember—and it's terrible—is everything else."

For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin. "While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution," she says. "Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution."

Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a film in the tub, but the rest is gone.
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Network

"Socratic ignorance": In praise of slow thinking in the internet age

Ephrat Livni
Quartz Media
Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
Socrates
© Creative Commons via PixabayTake it slow and don't pretend to know. Socratic ignorance is the hallmark of wisdom.
We live in opinionated times. Between a relentless news cycle and deep ideological divides, we feel pressure to take positions quickly, often on stories that are still developing, or on topics we know little about.

If we don't come to a quick conclusion and choose a side, it can feel like we're letting the proverbial bad guys-whoever they are in a given case-win. Thus, an opinion becomes a moral imperative, an act on behalf of humanity, or at least on behalf of whatever cause we support.

Consider the past month's debate over the Shitty Media Men list, a shared Google document created in October that compiled anonymous allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against specific men in the profession. After reports circulated that the list's creator would be named in an upcoming essay for Harper's, writer Moira Donegan decided to out herself as the woman behind it. In an essay for The Cut, Donegan admits that she didn't fully consider all the possible consequences of creating a document that transformed a "whisper network" into a written record. She lost her job, as did some of the men on the list, and she found that she had no control over the circulation of the list or what was done with it. Many have been quick to defend Donegan for creating the list, while others, like Andrew Sullivan, criticized her for it.

Comment: Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is good book to read to understand our cognitive biases.
In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.


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Family

Generation smartphone: The scary truth about what's hurting our kids

Becky Mansfiel
Your Modern Family
Wed, 31 Jan 2018 09:51 UTC
kids cellphone use 1
In the past week, I've read several studies that are scary to me... it's the scary truth about what's hurting our kids. We all know that what our kids hear becomes their inner voice, but it's hard to control what they hear from others, isn't it?

CNN recently interviewed Dr. Jean Twenge, author of iGen and her interview worried me - because I saw the truth that I would be facing in just a few short years. Dr. Twenge started doing research 25 years ago on generational differences, but when 2011 -2012 hit, she saw something that would scare her to the core. This is the year when those having iPhones went over the 50% mark.

The results of that should scare all of us.
  • This was the year that more kids started to say that they felt "sad, hopeless, useless... that they couldn't do anything right (depression)."
  • They felt left-out and lonely.
  • There is a 50% increase in a clinical level depression between 2011-2015.
  • A substantial increase in suicide rate.Before I give you any more, I want you to look at these graphs and look at how the information correlates to the iPhones being released. They aren't hanging out with friends nearly as much.

Comment: While today's devices give the appearance of being more connected, the reality is that we are more disconnected than ever, substituting real life connection with others for that of a smart device - from which one can't experience true empathy, love or caring when it's most needed during those years. See also:

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Hiliter

Focus on the basics: Never underestimate the power of repetition

Darius Foroux
dariusforoux.com
Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00 UTC
repeat
The biggest mistake you can make is to ignore the basics in your profession. This is true no matter what you do, where you live, or who you are.

When you ignore the foundation of what makes you a good person, athlete, friend, entrepreneur, student, etc., you will never be consistent.

That's the biggest lessons I've learned from studying athletes. People who play professional sports are under constant pressure to perform.

Take Daniel Cormier, the current UFC Light Heavyweight Champion, and former Olympic wrestler. The 38-year-old champion has an impressive career until now. He won multiple gold medals as a wrestler. And in MMA, he has won 20 of his 22 fights in total. He's considered as one of the best.

On top of that, he's also a combat sports analyst and co-host of UFC Tonight on Fox Sports. The man is highly active. What is his key to success, according to himself? Focusing on the basics. He says:
"You don't get to the highest levels of the sport without having the basics in order."
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