Today in PhiloPsycho Freedom, I shall be discussing that little area of consciousness between waking and dreaming! It's a peculiar area where weird psychological effects can come about. The brief area you experience between waking and sleeping has been labeled as the Hypnagogia (AKA Hypnogogia) and can lead you to have a wide array of experiences – including seemingly supernatural ones.

Supernatural Phenomenon?

Some of the seemingly supernatural phenomena that can manifest in this threshold of consciousness can be out of body experiences, sleep paralysis, hallucinations, and lucid dreaming. Out of body experiences have often been thought of as spiritual experiences, or some sort of psychic experience, but have been attributed to this particular part of consciousness. They also have been connected to Dissociating from reality.

For this post, allow yourself to envision a sterile, lab environment. You're sitting in a hard, uncomfortable chair in front of a stainless steel table, all of which is in a room with white walls. The walls are barren, with a desk in the far left corner of your field of vision. A few moments pass and an experimenter comes in with a sheet labelled "Personality Test", which you are expected to fill out. You comply and wait a while longer for your results to come back. The experimenter returns and hands you a form that reads the following specifically tailored personality description:

Somewhere at sometime you've probably heard the phrase "Hindsight is 20/20". For those of you who haven't, this phrase is describing how much clearer events are once they're over with. We have the ability to gain some distance between us and the problem or choice of the time. This is all descriptive of something called "hindsight bias" which is how we're biased to think that things were obviously going to turn out as they did when they may not have been at the time. Enron's huge success that eventually ended the utter downfall of the energy giant? Obviously that was doomed! Their hiring description was basically the DSM-IV-TR's criteria of a sociopath. The people in the 2nd tower on 9-11? They should have expected another plane coming! The bay of pigs? Clearly JFK should have known better than to go through with such a shoddy plan! In fact, none of these cases would have been easily identified as a failure from the perspective of the decision makers (stockholders, people in the 2nd tower, JFK and staff, respectively). From our cushy position right now, it is quite obvious that these things would happen, but at the time, you can never be certain how things will work out.

There are too many factors at any given moment to clearly see everything that's relevant to a given circumstance.

I came across this post the other day and thought it was a great analysis of the habits we gravitate towards, namely genres of video games for you gamers out there. I fully support the following message:

It turns out there are two different ways people respond to challenges. Some people see them as opportunities to perform - to demonstrate their talent or intellect. Others see them as opportunities to master - to improve their skill or knowledge.

Alright, this post is going to be a reaction to an article published my Cracked.com. Cracked is known to do many lists similar to this. Usually I'll just read them, letting them slide if I disagree with them. This time is not such a case because it's so very frustrating to read this because they make such a faulty conclusion based on these studies. The article is titled 5 Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed.

The introduction is equally ridiculous as the rest of it: "Psychologists know to be careful ... because [they're] never sure what [they'll] find in there." Right. Specifically Psychologists? Not biologists, chemists, physicists, environmental sciences, economics, nor sociology? Oh, that's right. Psychology is somehow set apart because it studies people directly and can come across scary things that apply directly do us (unlike the rest just listed).

Experiment #5. The Asch Conformity Experiment

This experiment, if anything, proves that humanity will be more likely to survive. As much as we don't like to admit it, conformity is a good thing for a species' survival. Think about it: humans are communal beings who rely on one another to survive. If this weren't true, we would all be doing whatever we damn well please, and there would be no society or group to speak of. That kind of framework would ultimately lead to our destruction and we would be picked off by more organized groups of predators, or ones that were physically stronger. Sure, if we did that from the get-go, we could've become lone predators, but then we wouldn't be humans, would we? Furthermore, some participants did hold out given the immense social pressure for this experiment, despite the obvious signs of anxiety that manifested. If you're so anti-conformity to think that conformity equates to doom, your hope lies within these people.

Experiment #4. The Good Samaritan Experiment

Alright, this one may prove their case a bit more than the last one. Here, though, the study was most likely run in western society. Why does this matter? We're very individualistic in the West. Generally speaking, people believe that we get what we deserve; hard work and perseverance wins out no matter what! Plainly speaking, this is a load of shit, but that's another post altogether. My point here is that people with such a worldview will be less likely to help someone in need when they don't have the luxury of time to spare, despite being seminary students (not that priests-in-training are especially moral, anyway). A cross-cultural study of this has probably been done, but I don't feel like digging through archives to find it. Needless to say, people don't feel responsible for things that they aren't directly involved in.

This is related to the old moral dilemma: You're standing at a switch in a railway station. If you don't throw the switch, 10 people are going to die; If you throw the switch, only 1 person will die because it'll change the track that the train will go on. When presented with this problem, the majority of people will flip the switch. Now we change the situation: 10 people are still on the tracks,  but instead of standing at a switch you're standing by a really large fat man. You can guarantee that this fat man will stop the train enough to save these 10 people; Do you push him onto the tracks? Most people say no, despite the same outcomes present are the same as last time.

Experiment #3. Bystander Apathy Experiment

This study also has some merit to their conclusion, but education about this should be able to bring it more under control. Like they teach in First Aid training: take charge, assign specific people to do certain things. If you need someone to call 911 (and you probably will if you're using your mad first aid skillz), you don't yell out "someone call 911!", you say "You! In the Blue shirt! Yeah, you! Call 911!" By doing this, you're assigning 100% of the responsibility on this poor sap, dramatically increasing the chances of the job getting done. Also, you may notice that this experiment was based off of something I covered earlier: the Kitty Genovese tragedy. Bottom line for this experiment: Discovery is the first step to mastery; knowing about this problem is a major step in fixing it. I find their conclusion that we're all seeking reasons to not step in to be faulty. As discussed in the Kitty Genovese post, there are alternative explanations other than people being self-centered assholes who live and let die.

Experiment #2:  The Stanford Prison Experiment

This experiment also gives some merit that we're screwed, but it falls into a similar category as experiment #5: It's simple in-group, out-group views where we conform to what we think we need to do to satisfy, and remain in, the group we're part of. Yes, it got out of hand because power corrupts, but this isn't anything new that this experiment had brought to light. It's not like we're often given absolute power with no checks or balances to keep us from doing whatever we please, is it? Unless you're a sociopath, you'll still follow social norms. Ironically, the very fact that we conform to social norms will stop us from doing things like this, generally speaking, because it's not socially acceptable to abuse others in such a way.

Experiment #1: The Milgram Experiments

They come to a faulty conclusion, yet again, due to the fact that conformity is actually a good thing! Sure, when put to use for perceived evil acts, this is be a bad thing. But consider the flip side: when under the rule of someone with good intentions, people will be more likely to do good things instead of evil. As with the prison experiment, social norms will actually stop us from acting like assholes.

By the way, I question the credibility of the puppy torturing experiment they reference at the very end; Doesn't seem like it would get ethics clearance, and would likely get the full wrath of PETA. It's overly simplified to say that "all it takes to get 8 out of 10 people to torture a puppy is to wear a lab coat and ask them to."

Hey! Want to torture a puppy? Right..

My main reaction to this: Even if every experiment they sited showed the darkest sides of humans (and believe me, there are worse ones than these), it wouldn't prove anything. It's all up to interpretation, as any experiment is. Though, you could also say that science doesn't prove anything, it just disproves things and makes certain conclusions more likely.

Over this Christmas break, I was in the mall and saw a decorative wall-block that had Only those who believe in miracles will find them inscribed into it. So, upon reading this I began thinking about the validity of such a claim. Ultimately, I broke it down to multiple psychological processes attempting to explain it, though I'm not entirely - though generally - against the idea of miracles.

For starters, such a claim is unfalsifiable - one of the requirements for any theory to have any value for it. It's in the same realm as one of Freud's defense mechanisms known as denial: If we think you have something wrong with you and you disagree.. Denial! Essentially, if you are labeled with something and you don't agree, well, you still have it (according to the diagnoser), you just don't want to admit that unpleasant little fact. Same goes for this little stone-inscribed gem: something good happens to someone who believes in miracles: Hey! It could be a miracle!; Something good happens to someone who doesn't: Hey! Something good happened! But, no miracle. The main problem with this is that it applies to everything, which makes it have no value. Seems kind of counter-intuitive that a theory which is so encompassing is worthless, but it's because it doesn't tell us anything new or of use. Everyone has undetectable parasites in their body? Great, nothing we could do about that, then. Right?

The Attack

Kitty Genovese was an average 28 year old girl who worked as a bar manager in Queens. One night, she closed the bar, drove home and parked about 30m from the building at about 3:15am. She walked around the building to the back entrance where she saw Winston Moseley, who ran after and quickly overtook her. He stabbed her in the back twice times with a knife. Genovese let out a scream "Oh God, he stabbed me! Help me!", which was heard by a few neighbours, and fewer of them recognized it as a call for help. As (bad) luck would have it, it was a cold night and most of the buildings' windows were shut. One neighbour added their contribution, yelling "Let that girl alone!" at the attacker, to which Moseley ran away from.

I just finished watching The Nightmare Before Christmas and it reminded me of something that was said in Roy Baumeister's book Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty (which, by the way, I highly recommend because  it covers the topic very entertainingly and in-depth, with a conversational tone) that says that almost anyone who commits an evil act does not perceive their own actions to be evil. Ironically, most people are trying to do a productive or good act that they think other people will enjoy and benefit from.

To start this, I'll open with what studies show women tend to find physically attractive in men (assuming they're heterosexual). According to studies, when women are not ovulating, they find more feminine featured men attractive; a guy who, according to the theory, appears to be more likely to stick around and be supportive, should there be a child (rounder face, bigger eyes, more youthful (baby-faced), less aggressive, etc.). During ovulation, though, they look for men with more traditionally masculine traits: strong jaw, squarer face, more muscular, etc. The theory states that this is because they're looking to have a kid and want the best physical features available for their kid. (Interesting side-note: women tend to find the scent of men who have more different genes/immune systems more attractive (different from their own, that is))

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As related note to the last post, I probably should have done this one first. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) is a model of persuasion proposed by Petty and Cacioppo back in the 80's. It says that we have two routes to persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route.

Two factors dictates which route we take: our knowledge/ability to think about a topic, and our motivation to think about the topic. If you are high in both of these factors, you will engage in the high-elaboration, central route. If  you're missing either of these factors, or both, you'll default to the peripheral route. The central route is known as the high-elaboration route because we're more likely to want more elaborative information and to think about the information more thoroughly. So, if someone were to approach an existential nihilist and start making claims about the meaning of life, they would most likely consider the arguments and have the motivation to think about it. Once the motivation is there, we consider the argument: if we have favourable thoughts (according to the theory), we will accept the argument in whole, or in part; if unfavourable thoughts are evoked during the argument, we will reject the argument.

It's all too common that we hear these words bitterly uttered: "Guys are just stupid", "Girls just don't make sense" etc. Simply put, everyone is stupid at times.

What has been incorrectly derived from this for so many years has been the "Men are form Mars; Women are from Venus" sentiment that we are completely different and will never understand each other. It's true; Men and Women are different. But, what is failed to take into consideration is that there is greater variance within a gender than there is between them. That is to say, the best man and the best woman in a category will perform generally the same; neither party will have a huge advantage over the other on any given skill.

There are many problems with this theory of consciousness that we call the soul.

First, this anthropocentric notion that only humans have souls is ridiculous. Why would only human's have souls? Why not all living beings? or everything, for that matter? What makes humans so special? Many people will probably answer that humans are god's chosen species, and that we're special like that. Do we think that we're so grand that we'll reign forever? Nothing lasts forever, just look at fossil records. Dinosaurs, had they had the cognitive capacity to think this, would have thought that they were god's chosen species. Also note that humans weren't around at that period, which means our reign is a relatively short period of this planet's history.

 

Our first lesson will be on social priming and social interactions.

So, what is priming? Priming is when some stimulus causes us to be more likely to expect something related (Read: perceived to be related) to happen. For instance, if primed with the word "dog", you'll react more quickly when you see the word "cat" (because it's related) when asked if it is a word or a non-word.