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Originally posted by canttakesky:
People are emotional creatures who like to pretend and imagine they are rational ones.


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Hell, the only reason the Government hates crime at all is that it despises competition. - Frem

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Originally posted by HKCavalier:

I think the thread you're looking for is here: http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.asp?b=18&t=46131

I go on a good bit about the Halo Effect in that thread. From where I sit, the most troubling Halo Effect in science is the one around rationality and logic, and the corresponding pitchfork effect around emotion and empathy. It's an enormously destructive false duality. One without the other is gravely dysfunctional. True, reason and logic alone can create all sorts of magnificent technology, but it can't create magnificent people. And emotion without reason is pure folly. Science won't get a clue about human psychology until it can integrate empathy into its methodology.

I'm afraid your studies are no help, mired as they are in self-defeating notions of human nature. Ironically, it's science itself that undermines its own credibility by ignoring its most basic assumptions. These studies all perpetuate the grand "conflict" between reason and emotion. Scientists so often see themselves as fighting some tragically doomed Götterdämmerung against emotionalism. Emotion is the enemy, emotion must be done away with, or at least subdued, before reality can be apprehended with anything approaching fidelity. But if they've studied psychology at all, they know perfectly well that it is impossible; that in the end, human beings are emotional creatures. O, how very tragic! Poor science! And poor, frail humanity!

But when we look at our emotions--and by extension, our empathy--as the core of healthy mental functioning, these experiments begin to look very different.

The two pillars of mental health are high self-esteem and clear boundaries, but these are also two aspects of human experience that are hardest to quantify and systematize. They require of us a certain level of self-awareness and from that awareness, self-compassion, before we can appreciate their value. They are importantly not reducible to a set of rules, because rules engender rigidity and psychological rigidity is destructive to self-esteem and turns healthy boundaries into rigid, insensible walls. The key to reducing such rigidity is empathic awareness. And empathy is the first thing to go when Science sets down to analyzing its data.

What all too often happens is the scientifically minded person confuses emotionalism with boundarylessness, lack of self control. When people are afraid of their emotions, it is because they fear that their emotions will force them to act one way or another and they will lose conscious agency. And because Freud has instilled in us a paralyzing fear of our unconscious selves, we suppress our emotions and we patrol the boundaries between ourselves and others like sentries itching for battle. We become unable to distinguish between mere confrontation and an attack, between disagreement and hostility--not only in others, but in ourselves.

I'd say low self-esteem is behind all the conclusions in your 10 studies. These experiments are very comforting to our low self-esteem (we all suck, and here's the proof), and annoying and specious to our higher self-esteem. In my view, these experiments are unwittingly designed to make the inevitable triumph of emotion over reason look as disturbing and dangerous as possible.

All I see demonstrated in these experiments is that emotional well-being is simply a greater human necessity than achieving moment to moment logic in our thought process. The more anxious and love-deprived we are (low self-esteem), the more we long for reassurance and group identity, the more susceptible to manipulation by authority figures. To leap from that to the idea that we have no control over ourselves, or that we're naturally inclined toward evil and conformity borders on the misanthropic.

The "halo effect" is a perfect example. The experiment cited shows me that the participants--college students, still very much children emotionally (when will science stop using anxious, dependent, habitually submissive children as the default test subjects in determining human nature???)--the students, then, longed to have someone treat them well, and that this ability of the professor to treat them kindly and with warmth informed their understanding of the experience at the deepest level. And they got more out of the lecture because of it. Well, why the hell not? Kindness and friendliness are often bi-products of real wisdom, no? That the subjects were unable to name their deep need for warmth and kindness from the teacher speaks volumes about how their conscious minds devalue their emotional needs. (Wisdom is another crucial, difficult to define aspect of high mental function--oh well!)

When the writer extrapolates from this experiment demonstrating to me the value of kindness, to the power of "designer" fashions to influence buyers, the connection simply isn't there unless you already want to believe that people are gullible, illogical and stupid.

The crucial premise of the Festinger and Carlsmith experiment in which subjects are asked to push objects around in a box for an hour is that such activity is intrinsically boring. That is the "reality" the experimenters take for granted. And furthermore, that this fundamental aspect of "boringness" can never be revised naturally upon reflection, or the introduction of a new emotionally charged context--no no, they say, such revision is always the result of lying to one's self.

Well, twaddle. Children will often push objects around in a box for several hours at a time, not just one. Ask them why, and the best you'll get is "cuz it's fun." Children in this mode are very unconscious creatures. Such activity is a natural trance inducer as well. So, the experiment specifically affects multiple levels of consciousness, accesses very primal child-states of consciousness (which, in addition to being highly susceptible to trance, also tends toward suggestibility and the need for approval) and yet in assessing the data, these various levels of experience are reduced to the one: what does the college student think he thinks?! (Just about the least reliable source of information available!) Again, if you have a need to show that people suck, well, lucky you! If not, like me, you're shaking your head.

And on and on with these freakin' studies. But none of them get at what seems to be the fundamental premise of the folk arguing against forming negative abstractions about other people in this thread. Are there no negative generalities that are legitimate? Do human beings never act collectively against the welfare of other human beings, consciously, and/or unconsciously? And are all of us humans so crippled mentally that we simply can't discern such things even if they do exist?

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Originally posted by DREAMTROVE:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.asp?b=18&t=46131

Reading through that threads scary, ESP. To see myself. We are threadjacking ranters of ego.

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HKCavalier: I think you may be mystifying the matter unnecessarily. It's just child psychology.

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Children are dependent and seek approval. So children idealize their parents as the best strategy for getting approval and ensuring that the parent will desire the child's continued existence on the planet. When society exists to keep people dependent, when the natural psychological development of the individual is stunted due to her parents wholly--or in part--abdicating their responsibilities, then the individual never matures and retains the childish need for perfect parents/leaders. They grow up to treat their own children the same way, as commodities and objects of amusement/contempt and the cycle continues until someone actually, finally grows the hell up.

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In America in particular we have this bizarre and deeply unhealthy tendency to never differentiate from our parents. "You'll always be my little girl/boy!" parents say without a hint of self-consciousness. Grown men and women hide basic facts about their lives from their aging parents to "protect" their parents, when really they're protecting their dependency. 40 year old children visit their parents and regress to calling them mommy and daddy and no one in the vicinity tells them that it's effed up. Or if they do, the adult child is so fused with the parent that he/she flies into a compensatory rage. Add abusive parenting to the mix and you have an adult child who is crippled when it comes to discerning any shades of grey in the parent's character.

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That's the psychology that leads to the halo/pitchfork effect. Until we can see our own histories clearly, recognize the good and the bad and the indifferent in our own parents and in ourselves, we'll continue to seek images of absolute virtue in our leaders and blame ourselves for all the trouble in our lives.

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Most importantly to this discussion, the American Presidency is a religious office. He is the Father of the Nation. It is exceptionally hard for Americans to imagine that he might not have our best interests at heart--and far more often than not, if we do imagine it, we go to the opposite extreme and imagine him as some form of demonic life-hating destroyer. It's madness. The President is just a guy we hire to do a job. He's bound to be much better at some aspects of that job than others.

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Originally posted by dreamtrove:
CTS: What's Karrss in a nutshell?

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