Science of the Spirit

4 Forensic Psychology Studies That Can Keep You From Being Stupid

Greg Voakes
Business Insider
Tue, 13 Sep 2011 16:59 UTC

Forensic psychology might sound like a field of brain studying where men in lab coats standing around pristine laboratories smoking pipes and pondering the brain chemistry of prisoners who dream about hacking their mother to death with a frozen fish. Believe it or not, the strides and studies done in the field don't just apply to people who are legally prevented from being able to use forks. Some of the field's most comprehensive and groundbreaking studies apply to the whole spectrum of the human mind and can prevent non-felony carrying citizens of society from being really dumb.

1. James Cattell's Psychology of Testimony

Confidence seems to have been replaced in this day in age with correctness. It doesn't matter if the crazy thing you are spouting into a microphone, through a television camera or at the few pigeons in the park who can stand to be around you is completely wrong. As long as you are 100 percent sure of your assessment of the world, then being wrong about it doesn't matter. For instance, just look at everything Glenn Beck has ever said. The preceding describes this phenomenon perfectly (I'm sure the pigeon thing is just around the corner).

James Cattell, one of psychology's founding fathers who pushed to have it studied as a major scientific field, conducted a study to test the reliability of testimony by asking Columbia University students a series of questions and rate their degree of confidence in the answer they gave. He found the higher their confidence was in the answer, the greater their inaccuracy making it that much harder to shake their belief in it.

How Does This Keep Me From Being Stupid?

Confidence is useful for trying to ask someone to the prom (especially if you're too old for high school) and proving that you can do something when everyone else says you can't (which is technically everything you do). When it comes to actually learning about anything, don't let your perspective get in the way of actual knowledge by eliminating basic facts and data to fit some preconceived notion or belief. In other words, do the opposite of what every person on basic cable news does.

2. William Stern's Eyewitness Testimony Experiment

We've already seen how confidence can drive someones smarts down the toilet faster than Liquid Plumber hitting a clog created by a discount Taco Bell bender, but sudden emotions can also play a big part in basic memory recall.

Psychologist William Stern conducted a similar study along the lines of Cattell's survey to prove the effectiveness of eyewitness testimony. He had some subjects stage a fake fight in the middle of one of his lectures that became increasingly heated and eventually led to violence. The students were asked to recall the events they saw and Stern noted several errors in the events noting that emotions can distort the actual chain of events of a situation.

How Does This Keep Me From Being Stupid?

It's rather simple in this case: don't let emotion drive your thinking. The worst time to make a decision is when we're under a great deal of duress or stress and such intense emotions can not only cloud our judgment but prevent us from making rational decisions long after we've managed to calm down due to infected memory recall. So if you're in the middle of a huge decision and your heart is racing and making your mind try to think of a million things at the same time in order to make a decision in the next five seconds, take a deep breath, put down the gun and go have a couple of Oreo's until you can regain your composure.

3. Stanley Milligram's Torture Experiment

Seeing a header with the word "torture" in it under the banner of an article that's supposed to teach people how their daily behaviors and reactions sounds a bit out of place, unless you're an 18th century executioner, a South American dictator or Dick Cheney.

However, Milligram's groundbreaking experiment in the forensic psychology of situations and behaviors in the face of authority actually used a very serious form of torture to understand why some people do horrid things to others in the name of following orders, such as Nazi soldiers who obediently killed millions of Jews under direct orders from superior officers. The volunteers were asked to teach another volunteer to memorize and recall a series of word pairings and every incorrect answer would be punished with an increasingly larger electric shock, some of which could reach in excess of 450 volts. The person receiving the shocks was an actor and suffered no physical pain but the person on the other end thought the shocks and situation were real, under the guise of a fictional experiment about pain and memory retention.

How Does This Keep Me From Being Stupid?

Milligram found that human nature could be manipulated to reach extreme levels of total obedience under the right conditions and they could swing in the opposite direction with total disloyality based on a single variable. Maximum obedience could be achieved by making the subject a member of the instigating team under the guise of "teaching" the victim as an assistant. A rebellious peer could swing the pendulum the other way by giving the subject fuel to disobey his orders. So in order to prevent from being manipulated or misled, don't go into a situation where you are uncomfortable by yourself and surround yourself with people who can back you up when you are needed to do something you do agree with or may find uncomfortable. There are, as they say, strength in numbers. Just make sure none of them are carrying pitchforks and/or torches.

4. Robert Hare's Psychopath Checklist

The word "psychopath" or "psychotic" gets thrown around a lot for behavior that would barely qualified as "slightly perturbed" or, if you want to get scientifically technical, "just a wee bit cuckoo for cocoa puffs".

Want to know how that's true? It's simple, use the "psychopath checklist." It's an actual list of criteria established by University of British Columbia psychologist Robert Hare, noted for his work in the study and science of psychopathy. He developed the checklist based on his years of study of the behavior and personality traits of those who are clinically defined as psychopaths, a list that is fast becoming a standard method of diagnosis and finding effective treatment for those with psychopathic tendencies. The full list can be found at http://www.minddisorders.com/Flu-Inv/Hare-Psychopathy-Checklist.html.

How Does This Keep Me From Being Stupid?

If you haven't been able to figure how this can help you, maybe you need to use the checklist on yourself.

Comment: Indeed, the study of psychopathy and its implications are essential to understanding the world we live in.

Reader Comments

griffin · 2011-09-13T21:30:24Z

another hint

Don't just assume that you know how to properly spell someone's name if you merely "feel sure" or think "it looks right".

The famous Stanford psychologist referred to in item (3) was Stanley Milgram, not 'Milligram".

Duh.

bngenoh ·

tehe

· 2011-09-13T22:28:14Z

Networker · 2011-09-14T02:32:06Z

1) Having a couple of Oreo's is not conducive to calm, clear thinking. Read the ingredients on the package lately? FYI: Sugar, flour, hydrogenated soybean oil, cocoa, high fructose corn syrup, whey, corn starch, baking soda, salt, soy lecithin.

Stick with the deep breaths.

2) ". . . such as Nazi soldiers who obediently killed millions of Jews under direct orders from superior officers."

Pul-leze! Not more of the "Six million died" propaganda!

Max Nordau (1849-1923) was the co-founder of the World Zionist Organization together with Theodor Herzl.

Have a look at this Max Nordau quote from Ben Hecht’s book ‘Perfidy’ – which is available for free in PDF format at
[Link](on page 232 of 261):

Quote:
In the Zionist Congress of 1911, 22 years before Hitler came to power, and three years before World War I, Nordau said:
“How dare the smooth talkers, the clever official blabbers, open their mouths and boast of progress. . . . Here they hold jubilant peace conferences in which they talk against war. . . . But the same righteous Governments, who are so nobly, industriously active to establish the eternal peace, are preparing, by their own confession, complete annihilation for six million people, etc etc

And take a look at the article from The American Hebrew, October 31 1919, prophesying a ‘holocaust’ of ‘six million’:

[Link]
[Link]
The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!
By Martin H. Glynn
(Former Governor of the State of N.Y.)

“From across the sea six million men and women call to us for help, and eight hundred thousand little children cry for bread.

These children, these men and women are our fellow-members of the human family, with the same claim on life as we, the same susceptibility to the winter’s cold, the same propensity to death before the fangs of hunger. Within them reside the illimitable possibilities for the advancement of the human race as naturally would reside in six million human beings. We may not be their keepers but we ought to be their helpers.

In the face of death, in the throes of starvation there is no place for mental distinctions of creed, no place for physical differentiations of race. In this catastrophe, when six million human beings are being whirled toward the grave by a cruel and relentless fate, only the most idealistic promptings of human nature should sway the heart and move the hand.

Six million men and women are dying from lack of the necessaries of life; eight hundred thousand children cry for bread. And this fate is upon them through no fault of their own, through no transgression of the laws of God or man; but through the awful tyranny of war and a bigoted lust for Jewish blood.
~~~~
I’ve checked out the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War – not a single mention of Nazi ‘gas chambers,’ a ‘genocide’ of the Jews, or of ‘six million’ Jewish victims of the war.

Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; Churchill’s Second World War totals 4,448 pages; and De Gaulle’s three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages.

In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi ‘gas chambers,’ a ‘genocide’ of the Jews, or of ‘six million’ Jewish victims of the war.
~~~~
Arthur Butz MSc (MIT), PhD (Minnesota), professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University in Illinois, wrote a groundbreaking technical and historical analysis and refutation in his book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (1977).

He gives a wonderful example of the seemingly endless contradictions and ironies evident throughout the entire ‘official’ historiography of the Holocaust.

He quotes Martin Gilbert’s ‘long and copiously annotated study’ Auschwitz and the Allies:

‘Between May 1942 and June 1944, almost none of the messages reaching the west had referred to Auschwitz as the destination of Jewish deportees, or as a killing centre. Nor had the name of Auschwitz made any impression on those who were building up what they believed to be an increasingly comprehensive picture of the fate of the Jews.’ (p 340).

He compares this with the contention of Walter Lacquer in his ‘shorter but also copiously annotated study’ called The Terrible Secret (1980). Lacquer explains that mass exterminations at Auschwitz could not have been concealed, noting that Auschwitz was a ‘veritable archipelago’, that ‘Auschwitz inmates.. were, in fact, dispersed all over Silesia, and.. met with thousands of people’, that ‘hundreds of civilian employees .. worked at Auschwitz’, and that ‘journalists travelled in the General Government [German-controlled Poland] and were bound to hear’, etc. (Lacquer p22-25).

Butz says, ‘I have no quarrel with such observations, as I have made them myself, and on the basis of essentially the same considerations [Butz (1977) pp87f, 92ff].. ..Now the reader of Gilbert, Lacquer and Butz can make a very simple determination. He is being told that (a) in the period May 1942 to June 1944, those interested in such matters had no information of mass gassings at Auschwitz and (b) mass exterminations at Auschwitz could not have been concealed from the world for any significant length of time. The reader.. should assume both claims to be true: There was no information of mass gassings at Auschwitz during the relevant period, and mass gassings could not have been kept secret. Therefore, there were no mass exterminations at Auschwitz.’ (Butz, Context and Perspective in the ‘Holocaust’ Controversy, in the Journal of Historical Review Winter 1982 pp385-386.).
~~~~
[Link]
The Polish authorities said accurate estimates of the number killed could only be made by studying German documents seized by the Soviet Union. But Moscow has refused to return the archives.”

A most convenient excuse!

In 1989, I organized a write-in campaign to persuade the then-Soviet Leader Gorbachev to release the Auschwitz Death Registers captured in 1945 when the Red Army took over the Auschwitz complex. A few months afterwards this actually happened. Gorbachev released these all-important documents to the Red Cross, which showed in minute detail the cause and time of death, their birth, address etc.

The following was found:

74,000 names of people who had died were listed, of which only approximately 30,000 were Jews, along with an almost equal number of Poles and members of other nationalities.

The incredibly shrinking Holocaust!

The “millions” that we have heard about for half a century and that we still hear and read about today all started with the “testimony” beaten out of Hoess on that horrible night in defeated Germany.

Historian Christopher Browning finally had to admit in a recent Vanity Fair article that Hoess was an unreliable witness. Browning stated that

“… Hoess was always a very weak and confused witness. The revisionists use him all the time for this reason, in order to try and discredit the memory of Auschwitz as a whole.” (Holocaust Revisionism Source Book, 1994, p. 1)

Hoess’s testimony was used as the skeleton on which the entire Holocaust myth about mass gassings was constructed. Revisionists have concentrated on Hoess precisely because he is probably the most important source for Holocaust historians’ conclusions and exaggerations about the Holocaust. Raul Hilberg, who wrote the “Bible” of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews, (Holmes & Meier, Revised Edition, 1985) relies on Hoess’s testimony heavily – and Hoess was the primary witness relied upon by the Nuremberg Tribunal in their judgment regarding the “extermination of the Jews,” even though he told the court of having been savagely tortured.
[...]
“… the Germans will have paid out a total of 80 billion (…) Without the German reparations that started coming through during its first ten years as a state, Israel would not have half of its present infrastructure. All the trains in Israel are German, the ships are German, and the same goes for electrical installations and a great deal of Israel’s industry – and that is setting aside the individual pensions paid to survivors. Israel today receives hundreds of millions of dollars in German currency each year. In some years the sums of money received by Israel from Germany has been as much as double or treble the contribution made by collections from international Jewry. Nowadays, there is no longer any opposition to the principle.”

Not anywhere you look!

After the Nuremberg Trials and Proceedings are stripped of the hyperbole and smoke screens which surround them, it can be put quite bluntly:

The Allies fought a war on foreign shores – in part to establish the State of Israel. The Allies lent a willing hand to political ambitions that grew out of the Zionist camp. By means of the Nuremberg Trials, the Allies helped the establishment and financing of Israel.

So as to secure Israel, the Allies and their personnel became accusers, researchers, interrogators, prosecutors, judges and executioners – all in one! The Allies supplied the “experts” who sifted through the German documents, which were all totally in Allied control, highlighting incriminating documents, discarding exonerating evidence. These investigators were told only to “find” incriminating documents against the accused, as I was told by the American scholar Charles Weber, Ph.D., who had been one of these Allied researchers, and who testified at my own trials. These researchers were told to ignore the documents that might have spared the lives of the accused German leaders. When all was said and done, there was not even an appeal.

U.S. Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, speaking of the American Chief Prosecutor, Jackson, finally had this to say, as mentioned in the Viking Press hard cover, cited before, p. 746:

“Jackson is away conducting his high grade lynching party in Nuremberg,” [Stone] remarked. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law.

“This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”

Some sanctimonious fraud, indeed! That’s how America and the “free world” have showed their gratitude to the defenders of Europe and Western Civilization: by hanging brave and honest men who tried so valiantly for so long to stop the decadence and the hypocrisy of what we now call, shuddering, the coming “New World Order.”
~~~~
Zionism: A Conspiracy Against Jews
June 27, 2004
In 1935 the steamer “Tel Aviv” made its maiden voyage from Nazi
Germany to Haifa with Hebrew letters on its bow and a Nazi flag
fluttering from its mast. The Captain of the Zionist-owned ship was a
member of the Nazi Party. A passenger described the spectacle as a
“metaphysical absurdity.”
Actually it made perfect sense.
The ship transported German Jews who had taken advantage of the
“Haavara” program, which allowed them to exchange their money for its
value in Germany products in Palestine. As a result, the fledgling
Jewish colony received about 70,000 highly educated German Jews and 140
million Reichmarks worth of German industrial equipment. This laid the
foundation of Israel’s infrastructure.
The arrangement also boosted the Nazi economy at a time when Jews
worldwide were boycotting German products. (My main source is “The
Secret Contacts” by Klaus Polkehn a prominent German journalist. It is
included in Olivia O’Grady’s The Beasts of the Apocalyse, 2001,
421-447.)
Why retell this story of Zionist-Nazi cooperation now?
Because “Jewish” leaders have been exploiting their “lesser brethren” for a long time, and are doing so today. Ordinary Jews pay the price
and this price could rise.
In my opinion, Zionism is a movement to deceive Jews into advancing
the objectives of British imperialism. (See, “The Jewish Conspiracy is
British Imperialism”) Zionists who have built their lives on a false
premise naturally will reject this view.
Specifically, Jews helped the British-Jewish elite colonize the
oil-rich Middle East under the pretext of Jews needing a national home.
Despite the appearance of neutrality, the British (and Americans)
financed, trained and equipped the Jews. (John Coleman, Diplomacy by
Deception p. 107.)
Henry Makow
~~~~
The above were from the comments section of a recent Veterans Today articles.
To continue:

Norman G. Finkelstein of the City University of New York says:

"The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Through its deployment, one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a ‘victim’ state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status. Considerable benefits accrue to this specious victimhood – in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified" (Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (2000) published by Verso, p. 3).

In other words, Finkelstein exposes the HYPOCRISY.

Some further quotes:

"In an authoritative study, Leonard Dinnerstein reported: Sixty thousand Jews . . . walked out of the concentration camps. Within a week more than 20,000 of them had died." But ‘As it entered into negotiations with Germany [just two years ago, in 1999], the Holocaust industry demanded compensation for 135,000 still living former (camp inmates).’

On page 83 he notes that ‘The Israeli Prime Minister’s office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million.’ Finkelstein exposes the LIES.

On page 127 he further notes ‘If 135,000 former Jewish slave laborers are still alive today, some 600,000 must have survived the war. That’s at least a half-million more than standard estimates. . . If Jews only constituted 20% of the surviving camp population and, as the Holocaust industry implies, 600,000 Jewish inmates survived the war, then fully 3 million inmates in total must have survived. By the Holocaust industry’s reckoning, concentration camp conditions couldn’t have been that harsh at all; in fact, one must suppose a remarkably high fertility and remarkably low mortality rate. . . If, as the Holocaust industry suggests, many hundreds of thousands of Jews survived, the Final Solution couldn’t have been so efficient after all – exactly what Holocaust deniers argue" (pp. 127-8).

"Both my father and my mother were survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. . . One of my father’s lifelong friends was a former inmate with him in Auschwitz, a seemingly incorruptible left-wing idealist who on principle refused German compensation after the war. Eventually he became a director of the Israeli Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. Reluctantly and with genuine disappointment, my father finally admitted that even this man had been corrupted by the Holocaust industry, tailoring his beliefs for power and profit. As the rendering of the Holocaust assumed ever more absurd forms, my mother liked to quote (with intentional irony) Henry Ford: "History is bunk." (ibid. p. 7).

"The Holocaust proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel" (ibid p. 30).

"Much of the literature on Hitler’s Final Solution is worthless as scholarship. Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud." (p. 55).

"Given the nonsense that is turned out daily by the Holocaust industry, the wonder is that there are so few skeptics". (p. 68).
[...]
Have a look at a typical account by one of the seemingly endless number of survivors: Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys: a woman survivor’s true story of Auschwitz (Granada/Ziff-Davis, 1947, 1972).

The blurb on the cover of the book quotes the New York Herald-Tribune: "Passionate, tormenting". Albert Einstein, the promoter of the US construction of the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is quoted as offering "You have done a real service by letting the ones who are now silent and most forgotten (sic) speak."

Lengyel says:

"After June, 1943, the gas chamber was reserved exclusively for Jews and Gypsies. . . Three hundred and sixty corpses every half-hour, which was all the time it took to reduce human flesh to ashes, made 720 per hour, or 17,280 corpses per twenty-four hour shift. And the ovens, with murderous efficiency, functioned day and night. However, one must also reckon the death pits, which could destroy another 8,000 cadavers a day. In round numbers, about 24,000 corpses were handled each day. An admirable production record, one that speaks well for German industry." (Paperback edition, pp. 80-81). [No trace of any remains of or in ‘death pits’ has been found.]

This implies almost 100,000 corpses per four working days, or a million in 40 days, or six million in 240 days (eight months).

Could this claim be a misprint?

Kitty Hart, in spite of her name, a Jewish survivor born in Poland, fully confirms these figures:

"Working around the clock, the four units together could dispose of about 18,000 bodies every twenty-four hours, while the open pits coped with a further 8,000 in the same period." (p. 118; Return to Auschwitz - paperback edition by Granada (1981, 1983).

According to the cover blurb, "The subject of the award-winning Yorkshire television documentary of the same name." "Both engaging and harrowing . . . an important addition to the growing holocaust literature, very little of which conveys so courageously both the daily torment and the will to survive" – Martin Gilbert, The Times.

Martin Gilbert, indefatigable Jewish campaigner on behalf of the ‘Holocaust’ and biographer of Winston Churchill, adds to the rich flavour and makes his own numerical claims, certainly not without chutzpah:

In his book Auschwitz and the Allies (1981) he states:

"The deliberate attempt to destroy systematically all of Europe’s Jews was unsuspected in the spring and early summer of 1942: the very period during which it was at its most intense, and during which hundreds of thousands of Jews were being gassed every day at Belzec, Chelmo, Sobibor and Treblinka." (p. 26).

If we assume a minimum figure of 200,000 per day, this amounts to say one million over a five-day working week, or 6 million in six weeks, and this does not include the truly awe-inspiring claims for Auschwitz put forward by Hart and Lengyel with Gilbert’s blessing.

A detailed forensic examination of the site of the wartime Treblinka camp, using sophisticated electronic ground penetrating radar, has found no evidence of mass graves there.

For six days in October 1999, an Australian team headed by Richard Krege, a qualified electronics engineer, carried out an examination of the soil at the site of the former Treblinka II camp in Poland, where, Holocaust historians say, more than half a million Jews were put to death in gas chambers and then buried in mass graves.

According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1997), for example, "a total of 870,000 people" were killed and buried at Treblinka between July 1942 and April 1943. Then, between April and July 1943, the hundreds of thousands of corpses were allegedly dug up and burned in batches of 2,000 or 2,500 on large grids made of railway ties.

Krege's team used an $80,000 Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) device, which sends out vertical radar signals that are visible on a computer monitor. GPR detects any large-scale disturbances in the soil structure to a normal effective depth of four or five meters, and sometimes up to ten meters. (GPR devices are routinely used around the world by geologists, archeologists, and police.) In its Treblinka investigation, Krege's team also carried out visual soil inspections, and used an auger to take numerous soil core samples.

The team carefully examined the entire Treblinka II site, especially the alleged "mass graves" portion, and carried out control examinations of the surrounding area. They found no soil disturbance consistent with the burial of hundreds of thousands of bodies, or even evidence that the ground had ever been disturbed. In addition, Krege and his team found no evidence of individual graves, bone remains, human ashes, or wood ashes.

"From these scans we could clearly identify the largely undisturbed horizontal stratigraphic layering, better known as horizons, of the soil under the camp site," says the 30-year old Krege, who lives in Canberra. "We know from scans of grave sites, and other sites with known soil disturbances, such as quarries, when this natural layering is massively disrupted or missing altogether." Because normal geological processes are very slow acting, disruption of the soil structure would have been detectable even after 60 years, Krege noted.
~~~~

Indeed, we all need to work on not being stupid - which means not eating 'food' that impairs our mental acuity and stop propagating the outrageous, bogus lies of the psychopaths who continue to write our 'history' and who also continue to propagate war - for THEIR benefit!

ironjam628 · 2011-09-14T08:00:24Z

Thanks for the advice on Oreos. Very insightful.

Zote · 2011-09-15T23:22:23Z

my god... ill never eat oreos again!

NugaBurd · 2011-09-16T04:15:11Z

Ever wonder why Jews cling religiously to the six million figure? It's not only religiously in the figurative sense, as in tenaciously. It's also religiously in the literal sense, as in the original sense of "from books."

According to the Talmud, all but six million Jews would gather back together in Zion. This means that six million Jews had to somehow disappear.

The latest reincarnation of this six million figure was what is claimed to have happened in the Holocaust. If six million Jews were not exterminated, then, according to Jewish law, the founding of the state of Israel was illegitimate.

Disputing the six million figure is an existential threat to the state of Israel.

For documentiontation, google

"six million" Talmud
or
"6 million" Talmud

Perhaps some people may understand now why the Zionists have said long ago: constant remembrance of the holocaust is necessary in order to bring...

PedroCarpintero

This should pinpoint some things [Link]

uniduo

Well the Israelis are doing a pretty good job of chanting slogans Like Kill all the Gazan's and kill all the Iranians. What's the difference. The...

Oldfart

"To The Last Ukrainian" Sep, 2023 . [Link]

Shangri

They hate people have an alternative information source they have no control of.

agni

Science of the Spirit

4 Forensic Psychology Studies That Can Keep You From Being Stupid

Reader Comments

Latest News

Picture of the Day

Quote of the Day

Recent Comments

Quantum Quirk