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Where did all the reason go?


Posted: Jun 20, 2015

America is killing itself through its embrace and exaltation of ignorance, and the evidence is all around us. Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter who used race as a basis for hate and mass murder, is just the latest horrific example. Many will correctly blame Roof's actions on America's culture of racism and gun violence, but it's time to realize that such phenomena are directly tied to the nation's culture of ignorance. In a country where a sitting congressman told a crowd that evolution and the Big Bang are “lies straight from the pit of hell,”(link is external) where the chairman of a Senate environmental panel brought a snowball(link is external) into the chamber as evidence that climate change is a hoax, where almost one in three citizens can’t name the vice president(link is external), it is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value. Our failure as a society to connect the dots, to see that such anti-intellectualism comes with a huge price, could eventually be our downfall. What Americans rarely acknowledge is that many of their social problems are rooted in the rejection of critical thinking or, conversely, the glorification of the emotional and irrational. What else could explain the hyper-patriotism(link is external) that has many accepting an outlandish notion that America is far superior to the rest of the world? Love of one’s country is fine, but many Americans seem to honestly believe that their country both invented and perfected the idea of freedom, that the quality of life here far surpasses everywhere else in the world. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201506/anti-intellectualism-is-killing-america;

Thinking is hard work -- but more than that, - val

[ In Reply To ..]
thinkers often say things no one else wants to hear. In 1847, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis said doctors carrying germs after dissecting cadavers were causing childbed fever. He told the doctors to wash their hands, which implied that the doctors, who were gentlemen, were dirty. Semmelweis was ruined and died in an asylum.

Remember, Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring) was painted as a nutcase, and climatologists today are mocked for saying that pH changes and temperature changes in the ocean will have major repercussions.

Reality is brutal, but I think not facing reality makes brutes out of people.

Social psychologists might argue that new-concept ACCEPTANCE is emotion/personality-based too - (edited) Julia Sugarbaker

[ In Reply To ..]
The most eye-opening and personally-influential college course I ever took, during my original career choice to be a licensed clinical social worker, was Social Psychology.

It was taught by guest professor, Dr. Margo Monteith, who had worked with the "godfather" of Social Learning Theory, Albert Bandura, as well as a research assistant on the now-famous "media and violence" studies in the early 90s before coming to my university. (The study actually asserted that violent media triggers violent behavior IN THOSE ALREADY PRONE TO AGGRESSION, the latter part being the part the press left out when reporting this study in 1994. She now teaches at Purdue University and focuses primarily on social prejudice and stereotyping:)

It was a required graduate-level course (taken also by select/approved undergrads) not only for social work and psychology majors, but also business, marketing and advertising majors, as well as political science majors and law students - and there's a reason for that - because it taught us how people perceive and process information, both at an individual and group level, as well as what info they tend to accept vs. reject, and and how others behave based on that information.

Most of us wanting to be social workers and psychologists were glad to receive this info, not only for better understanding of how the human brain works and empathy purposes, but to keep closer watch our own human propensity for classification, stereotyping and even prejudice of other human being for various reasons, so as not to jump to the wrong conclusions that either might impede someone's therapy progress or result in wrongful diagnoses.

Unfortunately, other majors were required to take the class to learn how to use this info for the sales skills required for their fields (in other words, how to manipulate others with that info - and I''m also sorry to report I've met other clinicians who ended up using it that way, too, contrary to what we were taught:/)

Regardless, we learned that that humans are more likely to accept new ideas if they already suspect that the premise could be beneficial/positive for them in some way, or because they think it will further support their already-existing ideology, but they will reject/push information away if they perceive that it won't (and in fact, will make "well, that's an exception-to-the-rule case" excuse for any facts contrary to their opinion presented).

Which means then maybe it isn't about LACK of reasoning ability - it's about our tendency to engage in "overly-fast" reasoning, based on emotional "first response" to stimulus. (This is why first impressions have now been study-proven to be nearly impossible to overcome).

We humans tend to quickly organize, reason and classify all stimulus information into boxes and groups nearly immediately, based on first-emotion response to stimulus.

The evolutionary benefit function of doing do is so we can react quickly to stimulus and to avoid chaos and lack of order, but we continue doing so because we get something out of it - we "FEEL" more in control of a concept, a situation or the world, and we humans like our"illusion of control" and comfort zones:)

With "people stimulus" we encounter, it's the same process. Without realizing it, we are subconsciously reasoning "this person is probably like me because ___" or "this person probably is not like me because of ____", though that's really not enough information to reason with.

Some personalities need a cushier comfort zone than others and/or need a greater illusion of control.

Other personalities have recognized and experienced (through social learning) the value and mutual reward of being inclusive of new things and new people.

Unfortunately, we also learned that though education itself has some effect on the former types of personalities, it's often BECAUSE education alone doesn't touch people's emotions/attitudes that it has not worked as effectively as we'd like.

In fact, some studies show it's actually positive social and personal emotional experience that will affect change more than education.

I read an article from the same publication of the OP, which also supports the above - that generally, most (political) ideologies appear to be chosen based on emotional values and beliefs rather than intellect:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unique-everybody-else/201305/intelligence-and-politics-have-complex-relationship

And just FYI perhaps of interest, here's 2 more articles some might find interesting, studies that claim political prejudice has actually trumped racism now as the most prevalent societal prejudice problem.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/01/28/party-polarization-is-making-us-more-prejudiced/

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-22/partyism-now-trumps-racism

As for me, though open-minded in personality, I AM still a human, and as such, I still have to check myself for stereotyping/classifying others (most often doing this along the lines of political prejudice, if I'm honest;)

PS - I am NOT referring to hate response to stimulus, of course, just initial acceptance/rejection response of new stimulus.

PS: We "like/dislike" here based on initial positive/negative emotional 1st response - Julia Sugarbaker

[ In Reply To ..]
... rather than intellectual decision, most often, whether we like to admit that or not ;)

And just before anything I've presented above is misunderstood, just to be clear, I am only referring to our human propensity to initially accept or reject new stimulus based on initial positive/negative emotional first response - NOT emotions like hatred to new ideas or people.

In fact, though you may not find it in the DSM-V, I personally believe chronic hatred of individuals OR groups can either lead to (or already is) a mental illness.

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